Last Bus to Arcadia
Literary Fiction · Speculative Fiction / Urban Fantasy
Marta Voss, eighty-three, has spent sixty years riding the same bus to the same destination, never once missing her stop—until the morning a glowing doorway appears where the bakery used to be, visible only to those who have lived enough to see it. Behind it lies Arcadia, a shimmering under-city where ageless aristocrats harvest the remaining years of the elderly, feeding on dreams their victims abandoned decades ago. With her waypoint fading and her harvested years already ticking away, Marta must rally a crew of fellow retirees and weaponize a lifetime of quiet observation to dismantle a system that has preyed on the invisible for centuries—only to discover the waypoint chose her for a reason that will force her to confront the one dream she buried deepest: the daughter she gave up at nineteen.
82,824 words