The Ashes of Around Twenty-Three Strangers: A Tor.com Original

By Jeremy Packert Burke

The Ashes of Around Twenty-Three Strangers is a Tor.com original science fiction story from Jeremy Packert Burke.

The world doesn't make sense. All rain has moved indoors--wrecking houses from the inside out while the skies remain cloudless. With ever greater devotion, people worship giant, inert, humanoid bodies as gods as civilization falls apart.

Lucy has never been religious, but her brother becomes more and more sucked into the church. She has no way to properly mourn him after his untimely death. Now, a year later, with the help of her best friend Carve, who was once himself a believer, she will travel south on a makeshift pilgrimage, trying to find peace and some better means of understanding the world.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Sep 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781250783875

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The Ashes of Around Twenty-Three Strangers by Jeremy Packert Burke

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At breakfast, Lucy decides she is ready to bury the ashes at the base of the god. I think I have enough now, she tells Carve.

Godspeed, Carve says. He sits across from her, nose wrinkled at the substitute eggs. The silver contours of his wheelchair shine bright beneath the kitchen’s bare forty-watt bulb.

I need you to come, Lucy says. You know I can’t drive your car. It had been modified, on account of Carve’s legs. He lost them before the world fell apart, in an accident with a city bus. The settlement money had paid for this house, the car. These days it does less and less good.

The ashes belong to nearly two dozen dead strangers—a substitute for the body of her brother, Noel. It is, more or less,