#OpeningSentence

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.

— The 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.

— The 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

So, there he was, barely conscious in the back of a black cab being driven down the Haymarket road on the spirit-side of London by a man who died seventy years ago, when Nneoma finally told Shigidi that she loved him.

— Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi

‘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

My father kept a dragon eye upon his desk.

— Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi

"The king wishes to be cooked alive," the royal secretary said, accepting the proffered saucer and cup and immediately setting both aside.

— The Hexologists by Josiah Bancroft

“Your mother is going to be a star,” said the man in the gray uniform.

— Counterweight by Anton Hur, Djuna

Captain Darian Frey was accustomed to long odds; his whole life, he’d been an outside chance. Lacking the ability to win in a fair fight, he survived instead by guile and the illogical optimism favoured by gamblers and drunks, which made the riskiest of plans seem like a good idea at the time.

— The Ace of Skulls by Chris Wooding

‘On reflection,’ Crake said to Frey, as they huddled behind an upturned table, ‘this wasn’t one of your better plans.’

— The Iron Jackal by Chris Wooding

Darian Frey was a man who understood the value of a tactical retreat.

— The Black Lung Captain by Chris Wooding