The Seventh City
READING AGE 16+
Nate Hollis owes a dead man. He has been paying that debt in junk shops and shallow graves, and it is never enough. Shirley Vance owes nothing to anyone except the father who walked into the Sonoran Desert and never came back. She hires Nate for a job he does not want, and neither of them admits what they are really looking for.
They join a small expedition into the Sierra Hueca. The guide tosses a coin before every turn. The leader carries a map he does not share. A professor explains every legend as weather and geology, until the weather starts following them.
What Nate wants is to go home and stop breaking things. What Shirley wants is a body, or a reason. What the city wants is a name. They are bound by a contract, then by fear, then by the kind of trust that only comes when you have watched someone decide not to run.
There is no romance in this book. There is something harder: two people who owe the dead, walking into a place that keeps count.
Unfold
The Seam
I had the knife out of my belt when it came up the last ten feet, and ten feet is not a distance. I could hear it on the rock. It had made the same sound coming off the shelf — something wide and wet taking hold and letting go, taking hold and letting go — and the grade of the wall had not changed the beat of it.
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