New Story: “The Ways Out”

I have a new short story in the latest issue of Clarkesworld!

It’s called “The Ways Out,” and it’s about a government agent tailing a ten-year-old skateboarder girl who has potentially dangerous psionic abilities.

Rocket Stack Rank said the end reveal is “delicious.”

Here’s a clip from the middle of the story:

Surveillance Clip S643/R57.D018 [File Uploaded] Human Agent Summary

The girl is good.

S1 is a fast learner, seeming to suck up skill through osmosis. When S2 does jump tricks, he has this slight upward tilt to his hands. Utterly idiosyncratic; no one else does this. But S1 does. S2’s eyebrows unite in perplexed happiness.

They are hard to track, now. They move fast from spot to spot. Like they are looking for someone, or several someones. Difficult to follow unobtrusively. They say little. Mic jumps yield nothing but background noise and skateboard wheels spinning. Cross reference of their geocache tracks to known routes of illegal activity among variant individuals shows minimal overlap.

There are no files on her mother. This is unusual enough to be a cause of some concern. Cooperation requests submitted to partner agencies in several allied nations tasked with tracking variant individuals.

Go check out the whole story, if you’re so inclined!