When We Were Starless
Novelette 13,204 words Recommended by 9 award/anthology sources
In the ruins of far-future Earth, Mink’s tribe desperately needs the resources of a large building that vanished humanity left, but she needs to purge it of “ghosts” first—and it has lots of them.
Content warnings 3
deathillness-and-pandemicviolence
Quasar links out; the story lives on Clarkesworld, where the author gets the click.