Flight and Anchor: A Firebreak Story
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Overview
From the world of the breakout novel Firebreak, an exciting new adventure of corporate corruption, hazardous flight, and divided loyalties. After a daring escape from a prison lab, two young, modified soldiers arrive in a freezing-cold city where they have no resources. With time running out, a sinister handler pitting the operatives against each other will be the biggest threat to their mutual survival.
“Kornher-Stace masterfully weaves a deviously creative romp that is somehow both nail-bitingly suspenseful and tenderly cozy, as if the authors of How to Win the Time War had decided to set The Boxcar Children in Snow Crash’s tongue-in-cheek hyper-capitalist dystopia.”
—Maria Dong, author of Liar, Dreamer, Thief
Stellaxis operatives 06 and 22 have escaped. Years ago, they survived a corporate civil war; Stellaxis kidnapped and modified them into celebrity supersoldiers. But 06 and 22 have finally broken free from their barracks. They flee into a strange city they barely remember, trying to remain anonymous while their faces appear on billboards.
It will be an expensive disaster for the director of the supersoldier program if word gets out about the escaped operatives. But she has paired them for a reason: 06 to aggressively engage, 22 to keep her in check. One flight, one anchor: a perfect team if they would just return to their rightful place with her. If not, all operatives’ days are numbered.
In Nicole Kornher-Stace’s newest addition to her popular Firebreak world, Flight & Anchor is a riveting dystopic adventure of corporate corruption, hazardous flight, and divided loyalties.
Lit Hub 21 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books to Look Forward to in 2023
Tor.com Five Must Read SF Books Published in 2023
“Set several years before Firebreak (2021), Kornher-Stace’s newest Firebreak tale follows operatives 06 and 22 as 12-year-olds who have escaped from the Stellaxis headquarters, where they have lived and trained since they were orphaned 4 years earlier in the corporate civil war. Besides discovering that they are woefully unprepared for living on their own as they hide in an abandoned shipping container mere blocks from their home, they also learn of the operatives’ merchandise generated by Stellaxis’ marketing department. Not only are their own statistics blatantly exaggerated, they are also described as artificial humans made to be perfect weapons, which is outrageous given their vague memories of childhood before being ‘rescued’ by Stellaxis. Relying on dumpster diving, selling recycled cans, and some charity, they struggle to feed themselves while the Director, hiding their escape from the company to protect her job, sabotages their lives with nanobots. This distressing yet delightful prequel explains the history between 06 and 22, cementing the reasoning behind their actions in Firebreak and expanding readers’ understanding of the dystopian, corporate-owned world Kornher-Stace has created.”
—Booklist
“Cyborg Boxcar Children vs. the nanomachines, only make it a character study in possibility, heartache, sacrifice, and friendship. Wonderful.”
—Max Gladstone, author of Last Exit
“In the future, the U.S. has been replaced by two corporations, one of which is Stellaxis, which kidnaps and makes children into supersoldiers. This prequel to Firebreak presents a compelling, heartbreaking origin story for 06 and 22, two of the orphaned, brainwashed, child-soldier superheroes whose plight became the cause célèbre that finally opened a chink in Stellaxis’s carefully constructed, spin-doctored armor. The always rebellious 06 and her stalwart follower 22 run away from their corporate overseers and attempt to blend into the population. It’s a dream that is doomed to fail, but the children are too young to realize it and too selfless to leave each other behind—to a terrible cost, now and in the years to come. Readers who loved Firebreak are going to fall hard for this story, as it adds layers to the buckets of heartbreak, and tears to the already poignant ending of their saga. VERDICT: A terrific entry point into this compelling, corrupt, dystopian world, with a story about the forging of unbreakable bonds set against harrowing adventure, heartrending choices, and traumatic consequences.”
—Library Journal
“Kornher-Stace finds a perfect balance between human childhood and otherworldliness by making us fall for the myth and propaganda surrounding 06 and 22 while also making them deeply human, if only deep down. A burning ember of humanity in the midst of overwhelming propaganda.”
—Bookish Brew’s Reviews
“Kornher-Stace masterfully weaves a deviously creative romp that is somehow both nail-bitingly suspenseful and tenderly cozy, as if the authors of How to Win the Time War had decided to set The Boxcar Children in Snow Crash’s tongue-in-cheek hyper-capitalist dystopia. Flight & Anchor is a stunning achievement, one that hauls on the heartstrings as it tickles the brain with the effervescent prose of a Beat master, sure to bust through even the toughest reading slump—though I definitely expect no less from this must-buy author.”
—Maria Dong, author of Liar, Dreamer, Thief
“We join twelve-year old super-soldier operatives and inseparable BFFs 06 and 22, years before they’ll inspire a people’s rebellion in Firebreak, centuries before their exploits will influence the post-apocalyptic Archivist Wasp. On the lam from the cruel program that created them, they’re capable of astonishing feats of heroism and destruction, but they’re also lost kids who only have each other to rely on. Kornher-Stace’s nail-biting novella, full of Easter eggs for fans of her expanding universe, keeps us grounded in stakes that are both world-shattering and movingly human.”
—Mike Allen, Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of Aftermath of an Industrial Accident
“Nicole Kornher-Stace’s Flight & Anchor pulls you along with the speed of a dystopian freight train. Taking the weaponized childhoods of kids like Ender and blending in a touch of Hanna-style rebellion against the mother organization, Kornher-Stace draws you into a story not only of survival but of calculated surrender to drive the best possible outcome.”
—Kimberly Unger, author of Nucleation
“Nicole Kornher-Stace deftly—exquisitely—balances the lightness of classic runaway-child books (Boxcar Children! From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler!) with the savagery of survival-in-the-wilderness books (Hatchet! Robinson Crusoe!) to entertaining and harrowing effect.”
—C. S. E. Cooney, author of Saint Death’s Daughter
“I’d recommend Flight & Anchor if you like Stranger Things, dystopian world-building, human modification.”
—Potions and Puzzles
5/5 stars “Overall, Flight & Anchor is a great addition to the Firebreak universe. If you loved the first novel like I did, you will surely love this one as well.”
—Enthralled Bookworm
5/5 stars. “This novella does a lot of unexpected heavy lifting for the backstories of 06 and 22 (as seen in Nicole’s other works such as Firebreak) and I’ll just say it now: it was a delight.”
—Bradley Horner’s Book Reviews
“Without a doubt, one of my all-time favorite aspec relationships is the purely platonic bond between the supersoldiers known as 06 and 22 in the novels by Nicole Kornher-Stace.” —The Asexual Geek
- Title: Flight & Anchor: A Firebreak Story
- Author: Nicole Kornher-Stace
- Publisher: Tachyon Publications
- Print Publication Date: 2023
- Logos Release Date: 2022
- Pages: 192
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781616963934, 9781616963927, 1616963921, 161696393X
- Resource ID: LLS:9781616963934
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-21T20:12:42Z
Nicole Kornher-Stace is the author of the Norton Award finalist Archivist Wasp and its sequel, Latchkey. Her short fiction has appeared in Uncanny, Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, and many anthologies. Her latest books are the adult SFF thriller Firebreak (Saga Press, 2021) and middle-grade space adventure Jillian Vs Parasite Planet (Tachyon Publications, 2021). She lives in New Paltz, New York, with her family. Kornher-Stace can be found online on Twitter at @wirewalking.
One cold night, two children stand in front of a coffee shop. Snow blows all around them, and they are badly dressed for it. A boy and a girl, the barista thinks, noticing them through the plate glass. Young enough or short enough that the window-paint lettering COFFEE, retouched just that morning by the barista themself in blue to match the blue chalk on the sidewalk chalkboard, arcs over both their cold-huddled heads like a monochrome rainbow.
Strange clothing, the barista notes. The one they think might be a girl is in an oversized lime-green blazer, the maybe-boy in a white lab coat, like a tiny pharmacist. Both blazer and lab coat are buttoned the whole way up, but the blazer only goes so far. Beneath it, the girl’s got on what looks like a simple dark shirt that buttons up the front. No winter gear to speak of. No real coats, even. Snow in their hair. Window light pools around them: soft, buttery, looking much warmer than it is.
The barista checks the time on their lenses. Four minutes till closing. Quiet this time of evening, usually. Storm like this, the place is dead.
A normal day, they’d be finishing up wiping down the counters now. Flipping the door sign—like the chalkboard, a symptom of how terminally old-school their boss is—to CLOSED. Walking the six blocks to the checkpoint, then the two blocks home. Tilting their head back, from time to time, to let the app on their lenses show them where the stars would be, if the sky weren’t wall-to-wall snow and smog instead.
Rag frozen in their hand, though, they’re just standing there. Watching these two weird kids devour that yellow light with their eyes.
Nine years old or so, the barista reckons. Then reconsiders. It’s the look on the children’s faces that’s lifting years off them, peeling them back to something less worldly, less certain. It’s in the way the upper half of the girl’s body is oscillating toward and away from the door, one indecisive degree at a time, while her feet, in their no doubt seasonally inappropriate attire, do not move. In the way the boy holds himself in perfect ready stillness, in a way that reminds the barista of nothing so much as their cat, facing down a spider, unsure which of them is the hunter and which the prey.
Eleven, maybe. Twelve at most. In any case too young for this shit. Unsupervised. Underdressed. Three hours into an expected all-night nor’easter. They look like they’re wearing half a Halloween costume apiece. And not the good kind. The kind you slap together out of stuff from your parents’ closets and basements when you can’t afford the ones at the party store.
The snow is coming down in big clumpy flakes now. When it hits the kids’ faces, it takes an alarmingly long time to melt.
In hindsight, the barista will wonder why it took them so long to act. Unpack, in bullet points, as part of a whole minute-by-minute replay of everything they should have done instead. Rationalize, albeit feebly.
Because the real answer makes less sense.