Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu
ShortStory 3,591 words Recommended by 4 award/anthology sources
"I’d always known Calam would run. He had all the signs. A taut restlessness, body brittle as an overstretched lute string, when we stayed too long in one place. A gloom in his eyes, as we drifted through stretches of dead space. A sullen crease between the brows, whenever I tried to ask how he’d landed in that dead-end Martian workshop at seventeen."
Content warnings 2
deathviolence
Quasar links out; the story lives on Lightspeed, where the author gets the click.