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The last dragon of Verrin Vale did not come to the palace with fire or thunder. She came on a grey morning in late autumn, folded small into the shape of a tired old woman with a satchel of ink-stained letters, and she asked the chamberlain for work.

Her name was Ysolde Cindermaw, though she had gone by Mistress Sooth for two hundred years. Her wings had become a shawl. Her claws had become spectacles. Only the faint scent of cloves and hot stone clung to her, and the chamberlain, who had a cold, sneezed twice and waved her in.

The royal library was a tower of pale oak and dust-gold light, its shelves rising past the reach of any ladder. The old librarian had died in summer, and the books had been drifting into disorder ever since. Ysolde walked the aisles with her hand brushing the spines, and where her fingers passed, the volumes stilled and slid into their proper places like obedient swallows.

Prince Taddeus, nineteen and bored, found her at the far window. "You're not the usual sort of applicant," he said.

Ines Okafor had walked the spine corridor of the *Halcyon Reach* for eleven years, and in all that time its walls had never surprised her. Seventy-two hundred people lived inside its curved steel, and every panel, pipe and hatch was logged in the ship's master registry. So when her maintenance drone, Pell, stopped at the end of Corridor Nine and chirped a sharp two-note warning, she assumed a coolant leak.

It wasn't a leak. It was a door, flush with the wall, its seam so fine that the bare lamp light barely caught it. Ines pressed her palm against the cold metal. It hummed faintly, the way a sleeping machine does.

"Pell, scan it."

The drone's lens whirred. "No registry match. No blueprint. Structural age reading: indeterminate. It was built, Ines, but not by us."

Pip was a small snail with a big dream. He wanted to win the Great Garden Race.

Every summer, the animals of the garden lined up at the old stone wall. There was Lila the ladybug, Tomas the tortoise, and Mo the mouse. Pip always stayed at the back, hiding inside his shell.

"Maybe next year," Pip whispered. He could smell the sweet clover and hear the buzz of bees nearby.

On race morning, the starting bell rang. Tomas plodded off slowly. Lila zoomed ahead, her red wings flashing. Mo scurried through the grass. Pip poked out one eye and took a tiny step.