Affan lay sprawled on the giant seawall like he was already dead. The waves crashed against his side and sprayed over him, every drop a stab of pain to the hundred cuts he'd got when the storm swallowed him. His fishing boat was nowhere to be seen.

Disoriented though he was, he didn't need to look around to know his location. This was Jakarta Bay, inky black and smelling of rot. Affan's hand came out slimy when he dipped it in the water, as if he'd reached into the gullet of a decomposing snake and slathered his skin with its bile and venom. This giant seawall had protected Jakarta from tidal waves, but it also trapped sewage in the bay, dooming the capital to sink in its own piss and trash. Who knew how much of the toxins had seeped into his body as he lay there with open wounds? It was probably too late to do anything about it.

Ernesto doesn't bother learning hurricane names anymore. Sometimes the tourists mention them—Luisa's supposed to make landfall in a couple hours. We'll be safe here, right?—but they never stick in his head. Hurricanes, like tourists, are all the same: destructive forces converging on his home.

Today, they converge again: the tenth storm and tenth tour group of the season. The bay might be a mess of beach houses battered into splinters and luxury hotels flooded into ruin, but for Ernesto, business has never been better.

"I am told you cure heartbreak," my neighbor says to me over the fence between our properties. It's the first time she's addressed me since moving into the vacant cottage next door. I don't glance up from mangling the forsythia bush with my pruning shears.

"There is no remedy for heartbreak. It diffuses into you, becomes part of your marrow. I can't excise it. Only dilute it."

"Will you do that for me?" Her voice is a breath away from cracking. 

The ocean hated Jacqueline Morell.

The ocean didn't usually hate people. In most cases, the ocean regarded her human guests with indifference. She could kill them without a drop of remorse, but it wasn't that she wanted them to suffer. She simply didn't care. But from the very first moment Jackie put a single toe in the water, the ocean despised her. Maybe the ocean was in a bad mood. Maybe Jackie was one small child too many that day on that beach, but when Jackie stamped her tiny foot down, the ocean recoiled. This would not do. Water slid away from the sand, the tide going out when it should have come in. It refused to return until Jackie's parents packed the family up and went off in search of friendlier shores.

Wouldn't you know it. You're on a charter fishing boat with your two uncles and their kids. The boat cuts through waves, bouncing you in your seat. You grip the bench, terrified of falling overboard. You didn't want to come here, but Grandpa made you. It was Uncle Brian's idea to bring you fishing as an early thirteenth birthday present; he and grandpa said it would be good for you to hang out with your cousins. You hate the ocean, hate boats, and your cousins are seventeen, eighteen, and twenty. Think they want to hang out with a twelve-year-old?

The old lady knows nothing but her hunger at this instant. She emerges from her home, locks the door, and begins to hobble on her rickety knees down towards the river. The forest floor squelches under her feet, oozing up gelatinous black liquid that clings to her skin and travels up her legs. When she breathes, her nose burns from the sharp fumes in the air, and she coughs in harsh, guttural gasps as she hacks up a glob of phlegm.

"Not all women were monsters, of course," the man who works at the tourist trap says. His chair is tilted against the wall, legs resting leisurely on the counter.

He strokes the pelt on his lap. His stubby fingers tousle the golden-red fur, grease it with sweat from his clammy hands.

The girl winces. Her ginger hair, feather-light, falls in ringlets on her shoulders.

After the quake, the air smelled like dust and blood and the ozone of lightning spells. The students were all on a mountain retreat with the chancellor, so there was no one to do the heavy work of cleaning up the university but the faculty and staff.

The quad had been hit hard. Most of the statues of glorious wizards of yore had sustained damage, including Head Wizard Barra's, which had plummeted from its pedestal, separating head from body. I didn't even understand where all the stones and debris had come from, but a lot of it would have to be removed through pure backbreaking labor.

Abraham was rushing through his miracles. He drew out the rune-etched broadsword of young Haddad's great-grandfather and laid it in the boy's hands, along with the elegant sheath that lunar moths had woven from their own silk. Then came the maps that would send Haddad on the next leg of his journey: those that told how to navigate mountains by constellations of the sky, and those of the eight oceans that could only be read amid sea breeze.

Underneath that pile of iron and parchment and enchantment, the little Haddad wriggled. He was barely visible under the pile of destiny he held.

"Wait! What do I do with this one? Does it re-dead zombies?"

Amber has been dead three days when she wakes up in her boyfriend's bathtub. It isn't the scritch-scratch of the tattoo needle that brings her back—although that sting is strange and unexpected. No, it's the cold that shocks her back into the world. She's buried up to her neck under bags of melting ice.

"Holy shit," Cash, her supposed-to-be-ex-boyfriend, shouts at the sound of her involuntary gasp. "I did it!" He's crouched beside the tub, tattoo pen in one hand, her wrist in the other.

Of course. Amber can barely hold back her sigh. Of course.

Never underestimate the power of an entitled man with a fragile ego and too much paid time off.