The Worlds We Keep
A queer, character-driven post-apocalyptic science-fiction novel in two parts.
Part One
Aksel Voss has mastered survival. Living is the part he avoids.
Sixty-five years after the Fall, forests have swallowed the highways, and corrupted medical nanotech keeps the Hollowed moving. Aksel crosses the ruins alone and never stays long enough to become responsible for anyone else.
Then an unexpected transmission leads him to Avalon Meadows, where two dead scientists left behind evidence of a Cure. The systems designed to deploy it were built at the Halgar continuity bunker, hundreds of miles north, beyond collapsed roads, contaminated water, wild predators, and the Hollowed.
Reaching Halgar will require more than Aksel’s survival skills. Dane Mercer understands old-world systems, and he has no intention of staying behind.
Neither man knows whether the bunker survived the Fall.
They head north anyway. The old world is dead. The Hollowed aren’t.
Part Two
The Cure was simple when humanity was an abstraction. Now it has names.
Beyond Dovren, floods and forests have erased the roads. The satellite intelligence guiding Aksel and Dane toward the Halgar continuity bunker is losing her grasp on the world. Every community they meet knows something her maps do not, and each has built a life no old-world recovery plan imagined.
Then they meet Ruah Farah.
Ruah is a hunter and traveler whose family has learned to live in the transformed world instead of waiting for the old one to return. As Ruah becomes essential to the hard-won life Aksel and Dane share on the road, Aksel can no longer pretend that restoring the past is the same as protecting the future.
Winter is closing the northern passes. The satellite network is failing. The Halgar bunker’s equipment may still have what the world needs to end the nanophage, but reaching it will force Aksel to decide what saving the world means—and whether he can imagine a place for himself in whatever survives.