Ghost Orchid Press
In a future Earth shrouded in permanent darkness, humanity survives beneath artificially generated clouds that protect them from a sun turned deadly. Eighty years ago, the Coalition made a choice: plunge the world into darkness or let solar radiation burn everything away. They built massive towers to create the clouds, and civilization adapted to eternal night, navigating by touch, sound, and smell rather than sight.
Mallory Myco works as an architectural designer for BioHomes, creating homes in this lightless world. She specializes in senselenses—devices that emit distinctive scents to help people identify buildings in the dark. Walking home through a dead forest one night, she encounters Rein, a mysterious figure with glowing pink teeth and horrific radiation burns covering their eyeless face.
Rein reveals a devastating truth: the Coalition never dissolved after the Clouding. Above the clouds, on the tower platforms, hundreds of workers labor in brutal conditions to maintain the spinning mechanisms that generate protective darkness. Rein was one of them, sent from an unclouded region where the sun scorches mercilessly. They were promised their work would bring clouds back to their homeland, but instead the Coalition diverted all resources to maintain protection only for privileged regions beneath the clouds.
Rein escaped as part of a rebellion. Workers sabotaged the spinners and crashed shuttles through the clouds, sacrificing themselves to expose the truth. As Mallory hides Rein and tends their wounds, she discovers that BioHomes—her employer—is actually the Coalition, perpetuating this hidden exploitation.
When Coalition forces track them down, Mallory and Rein are separated. Mallory is detained, given a new identity as “Hawley Rain,” and forced to testify at trials that indict seventy-four BioHomes collaborators. Meanwhile, the damaged towers cause the clouds to thin, and deadly sunlight begins penetrating to the surface. The world Mallory knew starts to burn.
Desperate to prevent catastrophe, Mallory and fellow designers develop a solution: modified senselenses scaled up to tower-size, releasing gas that blocks radiation without blocking light itself. After the remaining clouds blow away completely, the new system succeeds. Plants grow green again. The burns stop. Humanity enters “The Clearing”—able to see the sun without dying from it.
But Mallory, trapped in her false identity and haunted by Rein’s presumed death, finds no peace in this victory. She obsessively sculpts clay figures of Rein, trying to capture what she’s lost. Then, months after the trial, Rein appears at her door—alive, healed, having searched desperately to find her.
The novella ends with their reunion under open sky, no longer needing to fear the light. Yet the story carries the weight of what was sacrificed: the workers who burned, the ecosystems destroyed, and the willful blindness that allowed such cruelty. It’s a meditation on environmental justice, hidden exploitation, and the courage required to face uncomfortable truths—even when darkness feels safer than light.
Marisca Pichette works in speculative and literary fiction, poetry, and essay. Her writing has been nominated for the Bram Stoker, Pushcart, Best of the Net, Rhysling, Utopia, and Dwarf Stars awards. Straying from fairy tale to horror to the in-between, her work investigates queerness and marginalized identity–often involving monsters.
Marisca’s Bram Stoker and Elgin Award-nominated poetry collection, Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair, was published April 4, 2023 by Android Press. Their debut novella, Every Dark Cloud, is out now from Ghost Orchid Press.