Aram Wolfe

Su'inn was hanged on a Tuesday and it was a lawful hanging. She killed her husband twenty-one years ago and has never once denied it. What was not lawful was what happened next. An Eternal named Azaelis, four hundred years old and eleven bodies deep, took possession of her certified corpse. An hour later a priest arrived with a stay of sentence, two hours behind a broken axle, and gave her back. Now there are two of them in one body. Neither claim can be withdrawn. Control cannot be taken, only given, and the body decays only while he is driving it, which means every hour she lets him work is an hour off the end of her life. She was a healer. She still is. And there is a great deal she cannot do without him. Someone moved her execution date forward by eleven months. Nobody made a penny out of it.

Genna Busterson measures things. Fields, fords, boundary marks, and the exact distance between her own name and her father's, which is the only line in fourteen counties she has never managed to close. She wants a map. A proper one, engraved, hanging in a county hall, with a line across country nobody believed could be run, and in small italic type: GENNA'S LINE. Not Busterson's. Hers. Then the ground moves under Marrowell, and Genna does something in the hour after that no witness will swear to and no instrument will corroborate. The county gets its wall back. The road gets a song about a spirit. The state gets a file. Three novellas in the world of Venicia, about surveying, paperwork, fathers, and the difference between being believed and being let go.