**ONC 2024 Shortlister** Heems is an energy vampire, a parasite, draining xeir hosts' energy with a single touch. That is until xe meets Shiro, a wily thief who happens to be the only person immune to Heems's parasitism. ---- Working as a doctor on dwarf planet Eris, Heems drains the energy of xeir unknowing hosts...
The real world skins you alive. It's a hazard of growing up in rural Suffolk... or possibly, it's a hazard of growing up. Either way, the Dorian Andrade and Isaiah Matalon who run into each other at a party in Oxford have become equally disenchanted imitations of the boys who used to spend summers eating stolen apples...
Levi is a nineteen-year-old asexual wizard with too many problems and not enough friends to help him with them. The magic and the price for using it is taking its toll but he refuses to give up before he has fixed what he broke eight years ago. But when magical beings start disappearing around him he is forced to ackn...
"We caused the end of the world. Turns out it's easier than you might think it is. All you need is a group of eco anarchists and an ounce of magic, and the world goes down in a poof." After another manic episode, Phoenix gets written off his parents' will, and he's trying to find a reason to keep living. Causing the e...
Nicolás Velez is done with casual sex. Listen, yes, he might've slept with everyone in his flat within the first week of living in halls and had a respectable run on Grindr, but what eighteen-year-old wouldn't? He's almost twenty-four now, though, and sleeping with people who can't pronounce his name is, as his best...
They say knowing is half the battle. But sometimes it takes more than acknowledged love to turn a friendship into something more. Being lovestruck and unable or unwilling to do anything about it is a special kind of hurt. Can childhood friends, Calvin and Ian, get over their own individual hangups and finally take tha...
THE YEAR IS 2050. Human-like androids have become integrated into society and every household, becoming part of our daily lives. They look exactly like us from the pigment of their artificial skin to every follicle of their hair. They protect. They serve. They obey. They learn. Tyler North is a struggling young photo...