Wait for Night

Sometimes you take a job; sometimes the job takes you.

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This is a Tor.com short story, which usually means that it is an incomplete prequel for some novel by the author.

Not this one, though. In this one, we get a complete origin story that emerges as a bit of a surprise when our narrator, Chessup, takes a crappy day labor job cleaning up a river in Colorado with other losers in the rat race, discovers some skeletons in the roots of an uprooted tree, and while deciding how to hock the bones, discovers something far darker.

This was a fast-moving, gripping story that was worth its Tor.com price and the half hour spent reading it.