She’s coming home for the weekend. Three months away at college and all she can think about is her little brother — the way the towel hung low that day, the dreams she can’t stop having, the guilt that hits every time she comes. One exit from home she pulls into an empty parking lot and takes the edge off. It doesn’t help. By the time she walks through the front door, the house already feels different. And so does she.
Four thousand three hundred and twelve deepfake videos of Alana de Vargas exist online. She never made one of them. At forty, with four Vogue covers and an Academy Award behind her, she answers the only way left: for real. Ten days at the Château de Valéran, ten scenarios, all live-streamed. No recordings, no archives, no second takes. Day One is a library, a professor of architectural heritage, and a photometer.
The Cataclysm caught them inside Hellhole Cave. When they emerged, they realized no help was coming. Civilization had collapsed. There was no law. No order. There were the Grays. They were far more terrifying than zombies. They were intelligent. They remembered everything. They hunted. Their last hope was Texas. Two thousand miles from West Virginia to the Lone Star State. Ahead lay nearly 2,000 miles of marauders, bandits, predators, disease, and the Grays.
Sophie, an intellectually challenged 18-year-old with Turner syndrome, has been lured into an escalating situation with a much older, wealthy man she met through her older sister Charlene's online sugar daddy pursuits. The meeting helps the nieve girl discover her body one message at a time through complicated family dynamics and new friendships.
Ethan Brooks is a Southridge High senior, six-one, basketball hero of a normal afternoon—until the teacher hands him a phone and the world tilts. His father is in a car accident. At City General, Ava waits outside the ER: black hair, wet eyes, the soft weight of a mother leaning on her son because she has nowhere else to put the fear. The doctor’s line is short. We tried our best....
In a small apartment at the edge of the city, life runs on quiet rituals. Kaori Mizushima packs lunches, shelves mystery novels at the neighborhood bookstore, and measures the year by the photo on the shelf—her late husband Yuto, work-rough hands, a baby Ren in his arms. Ren Mizushima is nineteen now, tall, careful, still home because rent is expensive and because this place still feels like belonging. He notices his mother more than a son should. He pretends he doesn’t...
It begins on a hot street with a sausage stall and a boy nobody wanted. Liu Xuan is eighteen, bruised, and already half-broken by a bully who only hits him. Then a woman steps into his life like smoke and silk—Liu Ruyan, the ice-queen CEO everyone fears, and the mother who has been searching for him since the day he was stolen from her arms. She does not only take him home. She feeds him, dresses him, and opens a private world of money, systems, and hunger. What should have been a reunion bec