#OpeningSentence

They call me Mr. Scales because I’m a snake.

— Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #2)

When the multiverse was confirmed, the spiritual and scientific communities both counted it as evidence of their validity.

— The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

Loret had spent the voyage braced for pirates.

— Days of Shattered Faith by Adrian Tchaikovsky

It is a vision of hell.

— House of Open Wounds by Adrian Tchaikovsky (The Tyrant Philosophers, #2)

An engorged, yellow moon painted the sky a sickly amber hue, illuminating a solitary figure.

— Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

In the course of a single life, a man can be many things: a beloved child in a brightly embroidered gown, a street tough with a band of knifemen walking at his side, lover to a beautiful girl, husband to an honest woman, father to a child, grain sweeper in a brewery, widower, musician, and mendicant coughing his lungs up outside the city walls.

— Blade of Dream by Daniel Abraham

Carl was twelve years old the first time he laid eyes on the Grand Abeona Hotel.

— Floating Hotel by Grace Curtis

With the guardian dead, the question remained: Who would do it?

— The West Passage by Jared Pechaček

The boy was taken upstairs without warning, unprotesting as he had been through all the changes in his seventeen years, the shifts from cell to cell each time he outgrew the bolt on his ankle and the Doctor came to exchange it for a larger one, an operation performed with a tool the Hold people called the Mallet, which jarred the whole leg and sometimes made the blood spray from the anklebone, and caused a sense of queasiness and superstitious awe in the boy, who would glimpse, for the instant during which the bolt and chain were removed, the shiny and alien-looking patch of underexposed skin on his leg which, according to the prophet, housed the seat of the soul.

— The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

There were many things Asuka did not consider when she agreed to travel from one sun to another.

— The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei

You are alone when you die.

— Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon

The largest private collection of rare artifacts from other worlds could be found in central New Jersey at Princeton University, and if anyone knew Maya Hoshimoto was a thief, they wouldn’t have let her anywhere near there.

— Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei

They say never start a story with a waking, but when you’ve been hard asleep for thirty years it’s difficult to know where else to begin.

— Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky (duplicate)

‘Humans are a necessary annoyance,’ my mother had said to me.

— Space Dragons: Luxorian's Crew by Veo Corva

We were waiting for things to converge.

— Dirt Town by Hayley Scrivenor