You're the director of the Stellaxis super soldier program. Your job is to take young children and turn them into warriors to help you win a civil war in a (to the reader) nameless city. Two of your prized specimens, numbered 06 and 22, have escaped into the city in the dead of winter. They are dangerous, as all super soldiers are: fast, strong, keen eyesight, and all the rest of it. 06 has been the rebellious one, but the two of them are close. They protect each other, to the point of giving their lives to save the other one. Your job is to capture them
and bring them back to Stellaxis to continue their training until they're ready to go to war.

This should be an easy job. You know where they're at and generally what they're doing. You don't necessarily know why they decided to escape, but that doesn't matter at this point in time. You need to get them back. The whole thing is a bit of a mess, though. Within the program at Stellaxis, you need to fabricate excuses why the pair are not in their various classes. You need to hide the whole affair from your superiors, because it certainly wouldn't look good on your record to have two very expensive projects get away. And it's not easy in a world where everything is under surveillance. Sending out a few of the other super kids to retrieve them, or worse, some adult squad, would possibly result in bad press and would most likely result in a lot of blood
being shed. So you try to think of strategies to undermine their partnership. Maybe turn them against each other. Send some old, discarded tech after them. Things like that. But no matter what you do, 06 and 22 are not giving up. They don't like it at Stellaxis, and they don't want to go back.

Just what are the two of them doing? Trying to survive in a world they've been sheltered from and know absolutely nothing about. They're sleeping in an abandoned storage container and basically scrounging to survive. They don't know what they want to do, how they're going to do it, and where they're going. The only thing they do know is that they don't want to go back to Stellaxis. It's a marvelous game of chess, really. The Director thinks she's going to win, but every decision she makes turns out to not give the result she needs. 06 and 22 know the director is watching them, so they're doing the best they can to make the Director's life miserable. And they do get a bit of help from an unexpected source.

I was a bit concerned coming in to the story, as I hadn't previously read FIREBREAK. It turns out there was nothing to be concerned about. While the story takes place in the Firebreak universe, it can be read as a standalone. Kornher-Stace does a good job of giving the reader just enough background of the world we're in without bogging the book down. And she makes FLIGHT AND ANCHOR a fun read. While it's not lighthearted by any means, it's light enough that it's a good, fast paced read. The novel is well written, the characters are interesting, and the plot is engaging. It's almost fun to watch 06 and 22 foil the Director's plans, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. FLIGHT AND ANCHOR is a book I recommend, and as a result of reading it I
want to go back and read FIREBREAK.

Nicole Kornher-Stace is an author whose work I will always immediately devour - their deeply fascinating characters, absolutely gut-punching prose, and delightfully twisty plots are exactly what I look for and relish in fiction. Flight & Anchor is probably the best novella I've ever read, and certainly my favorite - and while it helps that I already love 06 and 22 (and SABRINA!!!) with my whole heart and soul, this story would be riveting and heartbreaking and immersive and satisfying regardless of my familiarity with this author's brilliantly interwoven universe of "standalones." I am so glad to have received an arc of this book, and I will promote their works effusively wherever I am given the opportunity to. If you love high-concept sci-fi rooted in the mundane, ride-or-die nonsibling friendships, snarky AIs, and unapologetically anticapitalist themes, this (and Nicole's entire body of work) is very very much for you.

I liked it a lot. Readers looking for shorter stories, with great writing, interesting ideas, and likable characters should give it a try.

I was so happy to be able to read Flight&Anchor in an advanced copy!

06 and 22 run away from Stellaxis. The Director thinks they’ll come back soon –she’s keeping an eye on them, but while she’s waiting for them to come back (because sending someone to die while retrieving them is not an option), both children prove they are way more resourceful tan she imagined.
I loved reading again about 22. After Firebreak I felt I needed to know more about him, and this books doesn’t dissapoint: its pace is slower so it can focus in character development, getting to know their past and learn about their present. Fligt&Anchor is a very different book than Firebreak –it has a lot less action scenes and characters, and less political content (if you can skip that the main characters are literally child soldiers and they are kidnapped). Instead, we have plenty of time with two characters we wanted to know more of, and a couple of new ones as a gift.

If I have to summarize the book, it doesn’t feel like a lot of things happened. The argument itself is simple, and it doesn’t have big plot twists or surprises. But I didn’t feel it was boring or repetitive. There aren’t a lot of things going on, but we keep knowing new things about the characters and the world all the time –and that what we wanted.
In Firebreak I fell in love with 22, but after this book I’m loving 06 as well. And I hate Stellaxis even more.
I really liked this book. If you also wanted to know better the chacters and about their past, read it.

TW: calories counting and food analizing. I haven’t seen anyone mentioning this, but please be aware that this is something that happens a couple of times.

I have been a huge admirer of and cheerleader for Nicole Kornher-Stace in the past, but unfortunately this was a major disappointment. Of course it's well-written, but there's really not a lot to it. To me, it reads like "fan service" - something that adds background to well known characters and situations, but can't really stand on its own. I think it would be impossible to get much out of this without having read Firebreak - Kornher-Stace takes it for granted you know the geopolitical situation, the characters and the setting already. If you have read Firebreak, you'll be invested in the characters, but you don't really learn much, if anything, more about them. It's funny, as I was reading, I thought "this is like 6 and 22 meet The Boxcar Children," and in her afterword Kornher-Stace admits she was influenced by The Boxcar Children. Trouble is, 6 and 22 playing house in a vacant lot inexplicably only a short distance away from the institution they've escaped from doesn't make a very interesting story.

Flight & Anchor: A Firebreak Story
by Nicole Kornher-Stace
Publication Date: 13 Jun 2023

Full disclosure: I read this from a free review copy off Netgalley.

Synopsis: In short (and I do mean short, because the book itself is roughly novella length at 139 pages double spaced), this is a story set in the world of another of the author's works, Firebreak, about a city gripped by a war between two corporate entities, with a team of bio-engineered super soldiers at the heart of the conflict. This story features two of those—06, a girl, and 22, a boy—as preteens trying to escape the corporate facility that grabbed them as small war orphans and turned them into killing machines.
They escape and, rather than making their way out of the city as originally planned, hole up in an abandoned container and scavenge for food in the harsh city winter. The whole time, the nameless facility Director monitors their location by vital signs and tries to hide her failure in letting them escape.

Review: I suppose I just have to say this one wasn't for me. It seems built knowing these children as characters, without giving any real reason to WANT to; since I haven't read Firebreak, and thus don't have any grasp on what they do or their significance, my interest just slides off them like glass. This could also be due to the fact that this very brief story spends SO MUCH TIME on mundane details of survival (with a nearly two page listing of the random detritus they scavenge in their abandoned lot, that then plays absolutely no part in their story).

There are also clear allusions to events that happen years after the story—clearly referring to Firebreak—that are frustratingly pointless to this actual narrative, and so simply stand out as enormous flashing "Hey, remember this part?" signs. I don't, actually.

I was also bemused by how the book spent 13 pages, fully 10% of its length, in the largely uneventful and pointless interaction between a barista, Cass, and these two nameless children, which again had no bearing on the characters' further actions or development. In terms of Chekhov's gun, there were like four shotguns (Offscreen characters, suspicions, potential friends, potential foes) in that scene, and none of them ever fired. It was essentially 13 pages of "Then they got some cast off coats and stale donuts." Which they later did AGAIN after digging through the garbage.

That scene did successfully shake my affinity for "they" as a singular pronoun, since it featured Cass as "they" interacting with two unnamed people acting as a unit whom Cass immediately identified as "boy" and "girl" because I guess that's what a non-binary person does on first meeting preteens? Anyway, it was tortuous and difficult to get through, and served so little purpose in so many pages that I very nearly stopped reading once I realized it just hadn't mattered.

However, when something actually happened—the intriguing nanobot array that filled the so necessary "snarky sub character" slot showing up, the roughly two pages of action at the end, etc.—it was fun. The writing itself in the use of language and pacing are really quite good, so that was a pleasant part of the experience.

Overall, I'd give this three of five stars, for deft sentences and glimpses of an intriguing world, with marks off for not a whole lot happening that makes sense to this non-Firebreak reader.