September arrives with its sharp shift in light. Mornings become crisper, evenings edge into the early dark. The easy heat of summer fades, and the sky takes on a cooler, stranger hue. It’s the month where the moon hangs heavier, fractured by cloud and shadow, and where the familiar rhythm of days feels just slightly out of step, as though something vast above us has cracked...

Welcome to the eighty-first edition of the Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter.

This month’s theme is Moon Fracture! Come and take a journey into science fiction where celestial bodies splinter, time bends, and human stories unfold in the glow of impossible skies. Thank you to everyone who submitted their cosmic visions and strange futures; your work has carried us far beyond Earth’s orbit. Here’s to a September of fractured moons, fragile realities, and the wonder of looking up.
Congratulations to both winners of the September theme: Steve Beresford and Susan Lynn!

Fracture by Steve Beresford – Two mercenaries on a sabotage mission to destroy a moon realise too late they’ve been set up…

Resonancequake by Susan Lynn – A lunar researcher uncovers a long-buried vault containing children in stasis…

This month's newsletter features:

• NEW Flame Tree Press, Gothic Fantasy, Epic Tales AND Beyond & Within Titles
• Flame Tree Myth & Fiction Podcast
• Original Sci-Fi Flash Fiction #1: Fracture by Steve Beresford
• Original Sci-Fi Flash Fiction #2: Resonancequake by Susan Lynn
• EXCLUSIVE Newsletter Subscribers Special Promotion
• Next Month’s Flash Fiction Theme

Resonancequake

Susan Lynn

Solin felt it before her instruments measured or located it. A subtle pressure beneath her boots as if the Moon exhaled, not with air but with memory, long and low, somewhere just beneath the basalt shelf of Mare Imbrium’s southern ridge.

She stilled, letting the quiet settle around her. There were no seismic alerts. And yet, something moved below.

She reached out with her resonance field.

For most Lunar settlers, it was still an abstract concept, “resonance,” the invisible language of Cognos biology. But for Solin, it had always been a kind of second skin. Cognos weren’t just human anymore. After the Zomoëba crisis, after the pathogen and its cure rewrote the rules of neurology—and of evolution, the children born after began to connect—to each other, to memory, to biosystems.

The Accords came later. A fragile peace between the Cognos and the unevolved, drawn like a treaty line across biology itself. Earth honored it, barely. Mars obeyed it, reluctantly. Luna, by design, remained neutral. That's why Solin came here. No children were born here. No terraforming. Just research, containment, distance.

Until now.

Solin blinked out of the scan interface and turned toward the ridge. The pulse came again—barely there.

She crossed the basin quickly, her boots biting into regolith hardened by solar cycles. Her field pack bounced against her side—scanner, uplink, emergency beacon. Standard kit. But nothing about this felt standard. The seismic grid read quiet, but the harmonic net buzzed with interference, sharp then rhythmic, as if something beneath the surface had begun to hum.

She didn’t call it in. Not yet. She was curious.

The coordinates led to a small plateau, once marked for outpost expansion, now abandoned. But when she swept the scanner across the ridge, it revealed an anomaly: a hollow space below the surface, encased in synthetic glass and organic sealant.

A vault.

She started the microdrill. As the crust cracked, the ground beneath her feet shuddered. Not from the drill. From within. The quake split the basalt cleanly in two. A narrow crevice opened like a mouth, revealing the edge of the vault wall. Inside, three pods sat in a triangular pattern, half-buried in lunar dust.

Two were dark. One glowed.

Her pulse quickened. She descended slowly, keeping her breath steady, and knelt beside the illuminated chamber. The child inside looked no more than five years old, suspended in bio-lattice, their face half-turned as if caught mid-thought. A neural port gleamed faintly at the base of their skull. It was Cognos design—archaic. This wasn’t new research. This was preservation.

Solin reached toward the pod. Her field extended instinctively, sliding outward like warmth through nerves, a shimmer at the edge of perception. Then it snagged, not against resistance, but something…familiar. Not a pulse. Not stored resonance.

It was as if her own signal had been shaped into a pattern that knew her.

Recognition.

Solin opened her field.

And the child answered.

It wasn’t mimicry. It was live resonance, barely coherent, but unmistakable. A pattern forming.

She stepped back, heart racing. This wasn’t a child born here. This wasn’t research. It was a seed. A preserved Cognos in stasis. No uplinks. No shared memory lattice. No anchor to the Accord.

The implications were immediate and devastating.

She had read how the Contingency Vaults were quietly erased from public archives, whispered about only in resistance networks. Buried during the Purity Front’s rise. Seedlings preserved in case the Cognos were wiped out entirely. Early emergents. Some believed they’d been trained in secret before the vaults were sealed; others whispered of enhancements never tested on Earth. It had been theory. Myth.

Until now.

She leaned closer, watching. The child’s eyes fluttered open. They were green, with flecks of gold radiating from the center. Not confused. Not startled. Not weak.

Focused.

Solin felt a twist in her stomach, a subtle recoil her resonance training couldn’t explain. She reached for the uplink at her side, then hesitated. She didn’t send a signal—yet. Instead, she waited and watched.

The child blinked again—slowly, deliberately, and the air shifted. A faint pulse crossed the vault, almost imperceptible.

The second pod responded. A glow shimmered along its edges, syncopated with the first, as if listening. Then it blinked to life.

The quake followed.

This one moved differently—slower, but deeper. Not a collapse, a release. Dust swirled around her as the vault walls shifted. Behind her, a low mechanical hum began, an old-world system booting. And in her mind—no, her field—a second frequency bloomed. It was wrong. Not like the evolved resonance she’d known all her life. Not even like the feral untrained Cognos in the resistance zones. This one was colder. Structured. Predatory.

She backed toward the ridge. But the pod lights only grew brighter.

The second child blinked. Slowly. Not confusion. Not awe.

Acknowledgement.

Solin froze.

The third pod flickered.

This was not a sanctuary. It was a system. The quake hadn’t broken it. It had awakened it.

She tried to close her field, shut herself down, but a gentle pull threaded back.

The children weren’t reaching for comfort. They were reading her.

Solin triggered her emergency beacon. For a moment, she thought it might not send. But the signal flared. She didn’t wait for a response. She turned and ran, boots scraping against glass and dust, vault lights casting shadows in front of her as she ran.

She reached the ridge just as the last tremor passed through the valley. When she looked back, the vault was fully exposed.

Three pods.

All glowing.

And just above the hatch, faint but legible beneath the dust, a single symbol etched into the old casing. An early Cognos glyph. Modified. Inverted. Solin didn’t know what it meant. But she understood the feeling in her chest. Not fear. Not exactly. Something colder.

Anticipation.

She stared a moment longer. Then turned.

Behind her, beneath the fractured surface of the Moon, the vault continued to hum.

Susan Lynn lives in Delran, New Jersey, across the river from Philadelphia. A retired IT professional and nonprofit warrior, she found her voice in storytelling after years of writing persuasive grant proposals. Her speculative fiction draws on a childhood shaped by science and a lifelong love of reading science fiction and horror—especially zombie tales. Her debut publication, “Resonancequake,” is part of her expanding Zomoeba universe, a speculative world exploring the edge of science, survival, and evolution.