Excerpt from The Age of Calamities by Senaa Ahmad, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He gets crafty. He invents the portable long-barreled firearm. Then he invents the firing squad. Then he invents acute ballistic trauma. Then he sends his wardens to find her.

But while he's busy doing all that, she's been busy, too, inventing: cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The telephone. The 9–1–1 call. First-response teams. Modern-day surgery. Organ transplants. Crash carts. Gurneys. Subsidized medicine. She improvises like it's the only thing she knows how to do.

It is ugly, obviously. There is quite a lot of blood and gore and spattered internal organs. But she lives. Still, she lives.

* * *

LEST YOU THINK it's all maudlin garden strolls and gallows touched by moonlight, let's admit that Anne and Henry still have their moments. Like the time a scullery maid starts a stovetop fire and trips the palace-wide alarm. All around the castle, the sprinkler systems kick in, first in the kitchens, then in the great hall, and then everywhere, misting porous manuscripts, Brylcreemed foreign dignitaries, the throne room, everyone on their toilets, Henry's collection of vintage cameras, and Anne in her finest silk pajamas, snoring over her watercolors. Still very much not dead.

She escapes to the nearest balcony. And as she wrings her ruined shirt and her hair in futility, a window creaks open and who should climb through but Henry, his arms filled with soaking scrolls almost as tall as himself. He sees her sodden in her nightclothes and begins to guffaw.

She says, "That's not very kingly," feeling hurt, and more vulnerable than she wants to be, and probably a little foolish.

He says, "For your information, you don't look especially queenly," and drops the scrolls in a heap. She despairs at her reflection in the window.

"The gossip magazines are going to love this look, aren't they," she says.

"Easy fix," he says. "Here." He sweeps up to the balcony's edge, blotting her from view of the courtyard. So close that she's immediately on high alert. She steps back. Every muscle clamped.

"You need more width," she says, with all the calm she can summon.

He begins to windmill his arms like a complete fool. He doesn't say a word, just churns his arms up and down with intense concentration. And to her own surprise, she starts to laugh. She can't help it. He does his best deadpan, smile uncracked, but it's there in the twitch of his eyebrows, the glimmer of warmth in his eye.

"What's your plan here?" she says.

"Trickery," he says, not missing a step. "Misdirection. Excellent upper-arm strength."

You might think this an opportune time to push him off the balcony, make it look like an accident, and maybe you wouldn't be wrong. But he's still built like a professional strongman on championship day, and she's still most decidedly not. And yes, she's eager to please, and yes, even now, he can find ways to disarm her utterly. And yes, this moment, precious as it is, has a kind of power on its own, a force, and the ache of laughter in her abdomen will sustain her a few days longer. Do you really want to take that away from her?

* * *

IT'S EASY TO say that it becomes a game for him, and a game for her. In Anne's case, if it's a game, the game is Monopoly, her game piece is a pewter chicken with its head décapité, the banker is a scoundrel and a cheat, the properties disintegrate every time she lands on them, and the dice are made of fire. What game is this to him? If he's winning, does it even matter?

But for her, how's this for an alternative: on a spectral day in autumn, a cockroach tumbles across Anne's writing desk like a very squirmy, very small shooting star. It is swift, intrepid. In its wayward progress, it hemorrhages anxiety.

Its clumsy, heroic journey plucks the tenderest meat inside her. Is it any surprise that she sees something in the cockroach that hums on the same frequency as she does? She builds tranquil highways with her hands, one at a time, and is rewarded when the roach travels safely through. Her triumph is no small thing.

Excerpted from The Age of Calamities by Senaa Ahmad. Copyright © 2026 by Senaa Ahmad. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.