Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 136 short novels in Rebirth
The river smelled like cold iron that evening. I knew it because the adult in me—who had lived under fluorescent office lights and commuter trains—recognized it in a childish body. I tasted river water and panic, and then a stranger's arms. "Get her up! Hurry!" someone shouted. A broad-shouldered man pulled me from the current and set me on the riverbank. My lungs forgot how to work for a beat; then they remembered. I hacked and coughed and opened my eyes to a ring of faces and...
I woke to a smell like wet clay and old oil, and a hand like a burl of tree bark groping my cheek. "She's got good skin," a woman's voice rumbled at the foot of the bed. "Pretty face. Shame about the frame—no shape to her at all. Nobody'll pay for a lump like that." "Don't talk like that!" a second voice hissed, wheedling. "Look at her, Gregory—white as milk. If you ask me, she'll fetch more. Five taels is kind." "Five taels," muttered a third, younger voice. "I'll give five and a half...
I woke to a sky that did not belong to me. "Abigail?" someone said. "Is that—" I opened my eyes to silk, to light, to a hall dressed for a wedding. Red banners streamed like rivers, and every face in the room was turned toward a pair on a dais. The man at the center wore the cold, familiar armor of Aarón Muller, but he wore joy—he wore it in a way I had never seen him wear anything. Beside him stood a woman with my eyes. "Slow," a voice called. "Hold it—" The master of ceremony...
I wake to a wet, warm tongue on my face, and the first sound I make is a soft, helpless sound. Then I open my eyes. "Hey—stop that!" I say, but it comes out small. A pair of blue eyes blink at me. A huge muzzle pulls back and shows sharp white teeth. I freeze. The animal is huge. White fur like snow. Ears straight up. Claws like small knives. This is not a dog. "Who—who are you?" I whisper, though I am not sure who I mean. The wolf sniffs me again. It makes a low sound that I think...
I have loved a shadow three times over and once I loved a man who wore a chain for a living. "He looks ridiculous in red," I said the first time I curled into the funeral smoke and watched a man's life be boiled into soup. "Ridiculous?" The voice was all frost, and when the frost laughed, it sounded like metal. "He's dead. You should be disappointed." "I am a pig," I answered, because the last life had been a literal pig and I remembered the taste of blood being stewed with fermented...
I woke to the elevator bell and a clean, ordinary morning. For a heartbeat I could not remember which life this was. "Abby, are you okay?" Jacqueline Schmitz asked from the corridor. "I'm fine," I lied. My hands shook when I slipped the phone open. "Zack, it's three hours to noon, right? Six hours until—" "Until what?" he asked, distance in his voice. "The day everything changes," I said, and I did not tell him the real reason. I did not tell anyone yet. I did not want the heavy...
I never expected a nap on my father’s leather desk to change my life. "I dreamed it again," I told no one while I smoothed my suit. "Same scene. The wedding day. Same ending." "Again?" Finnegan frowned and set down a stack of folders. "You should sleep more, Miss Hope." "I can't," I said, and I meant it. "This isn't a normal dream." The dream had been cruel and precise. Salvador Barlow smiling, Kimiko Price smiling, my father's empire disappearing like smoke. Me—falling, over and...
I woke up choking on a dream and a century of ash. "You're trembling," said the dark room, which was really just a memory in my lungs. "Breathe, Ines." "No," I said. "Not that name." I sat up so fast the room swam. For a long, dizzy second, I thought the hundred years were real, every bruise and fevered memory. Then the candle on my small table steadied, and the silence around me took on the shape of a life I had not yet lived. "Who is at the gate?" someone outside called. I...
I woke to cold that pinched my bones and a dark roof above me that felt like an insult. I sat up, felt the thin cotton of my jacket, and cursed in my head: this is not how a special-operations soldier wakes. “Are you awake?” a small voice whispered. I blinked. The moon let a sliver of light through the door crack. I counted the breaths around me — three children, the thin rise and fall of a woman on her side, and my own heavy breath. “This is Kamryn,” I told myself out loud, like an...
I was seven the first time I almost died. "Stay with me," I croaked. "Ariya." She looked older than seven then, quiet as rain. "The spring has come," she said, and pushed a wet branch of spring begonia into my hands. "Where did you get this?" I whispered. My voice was small. The fever had hollowed me out. She smiled the way she always smiled—soft, steady. "I found it in a yard. I thought it would make you better." "I—" I tried to say thank you, but the words were stones in my...
I woke up with my mouth full of dust and my head full of someone else’s memories. The first taste was of iron and rain from a dream where I had been more monster than girl. The second taste, when I finally opened my eyes for real, was instant regret and the cheap flavor of instant noodles. "My name is Kennedi," I said to myself. "Kennedi Duncan. Not a monster, not yet." "Kennedi!" someone hissed outside the door. "If you're still in there, hurry. We leave in five." I pushed the door...
I woke up to the smell of old timber and soot. "You're alive," the old woman said, voice the sound of someone surprised by small miracles. "I—where am I?" I croaked, tasting dust and something sweet on the air. "This is my house. Sit, child." She propped a bowl of thin porridge under my nose. "Eat before you faint." I gulped the porridge like it might vanish. My head spun. Modern images—an embroidered ribbon on my wrist, a racing car's headlight—folded into something older, grainy...
I remember the winter like a wound that never healed. "The mountain trembled," I told them. "The sky opened its fist. Let it be a good year." "It is a sign," the ministers said. "A blessing for the realm." "I only asked one thing," I said to no one. "Only that she be well." "She will be well, Your Majesty," Constance said beside me, folding the child's small robe with trembling hands. "She will," I lied, because I had to keep some order in a palace that still needed an emperor's...
I died. "I died," I said aloud to the white ceiling, as if speaking it could make sense of how the heavy dark had taken me. A bar, glitter lights, a hand I thought was mine. His face sideways under colored bulbs. The red-lipped girl across him laughing. I remember the phone in my hand — "I want to see you" — and his thumb on the screen, then his laugh and the way he buried his face in someone else's neck. "I called you," I whispered in the ambulance, the pavement bleeding color under...
I woke up to begging. "Please, Mother, don't throw her out," a small voice pleaded. "Yes, Grandma, we'll eat one bowl of rice a day. I promise." "Don't throw Ránbao out," another child said. "She'll wake up. Please." My eyes opened a sliver. The voices were wrong but painfully familiar. A cold old woman's laugh cut the air. "Heh. If I spare her, you all are to leave my house stripped clean. Out. Now!" The words hit like a stone. I tried to move. I tried to scream. I was inside...
“He’s trying to kill me.” “He what?” Fox said, but his face had already told me everything. I wasn’t dead. I was sitting on his office floor with fingers clawing at a throat that was not mine and a hand—big, white-knuckled—still around my neck. “Elliot,” Fox said, rushing to pry the hand away. “Let go of her!” Elliot Bush let go. He stepped back as if my skin burned him. “You lied,” he said, voice low, dangerous. “You used poison. You pretended to be Hannah Winter.” My lungs...
I died in year five of the collapse. I thought it would be the end. Then I woke up three months before the storm began again. "I opened my eyes and I was back," I said out loud in the empty kitchen. "This time, nothing gets to me by surprise." My name is Fatima Leroy. The jade pendant at my throat had been my grandmother's. In my last life, a streak of my own blood revealed a space inside it—small at first, but safe. I remembered how it had saved me. I remembered the rules of that space,...
This is my voice after three hundred years in a cold, narrow place. "I am Clara Ford," I tell the bead that holds my soul. "You still remember your name?" Finn Guerin—my son—asks me every night, and his voice vibrates the small pearl as if he can rouse a sleeping heart. He is the only warm thing left in a world that took my flesh away piece by piece. The prince, Clyde Ramos, came and took from me what made me whole. He dipped my scales in bowls, he drank the blood set aside for Phoenix...
I never expected my life to split into "before" and "after" like someone flipping a cheap switch. "You're sure you want this?" my mother asked, voice small. "Yes," I said. "Do it." She squeezed my hand like she was squeezing a child's, and I let her. Booker Martin put his face in his hands and looked older in that moment than he was in every photograph on the mantle. "Your teacher called," Alayna Berry said later, smiling the tired, professional smile teachers wear when they are...
The blade felt unreal as it slid between ribs—cold metal and colder intent—and for a second I thought I was watching someone else die. "Lea," Alexander said, his voice as flat as the red robe he wore. "This is for her." I tried to laugh. "For who? Gabriella?" He didn't answer. He only lifted the dagger as if polishing it with my blood, and the smell of iron mixed with the perfume of the pond lotus that had led me into this room a hundred lives ago. Around me, Colby stood...
