Underrated

Some love is infinite "Don’t have a best friend that’s a girl" — this was the advice from my older cousin. I didn’t take it. Because he followed with, "friends don’t f\ck friends. And you’ll want to f\ck her." It was terrible advice. My cousin should’ve told me that being best friends with Baylee Wright—since she was twelve—would be the best and worst decision of my life. He should have told me to protect her from what was coming. He should have told me that when a darkness crawled towards us, there’d be no safety net. Now I’ve signed back on to the same Vegas acrobatic show as Baylee, working together for the first time in years. And she tells me that she’s having trouble in a certain “area” of her life—because of our past. “You can help me fix it,” she says. And then she hands me a list.

A princess with two futures. A destiny all her own. Between her cruel family and the contempt she faces at court, Princess Alyrra has always longed to escape the confines of her royal life. But when she’s betrothed to the powerful prince Kestrin, Alyrra embarks on a journey to his land with little hope for a better future. When a mysterious and terrifying sorceress robs Alyrra of both her identity and her role as princess, Alyrra seizes the opportunity to start a new life for herself as a goose girl. But Alyrra soon finds that Kestrin is not what she expected. The more Alyrra learns of this new kingdom, the pain and suffering its people endure, as well as the danger facing Kestrin from the sorceress herself, the more she knows she can’t remain the goose girl forever. With the fate of the kingdom at stake, Alyrra is caught between two worlds and ultimately must decide who she is, and what she stands for. Includes The Bone Knife, a bonus short story set in the world of Thorn.

"As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure." In a corporate-dominated space-faring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. For their own safety, exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern. On a distant planet, a team of scientists is conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid—a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, Murderbot wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is, but when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and Murderbot to get to the truth.