The City That Arrived Yesterday

About this book

Vesper never stops. Riding articulated rails around the twilight band of tidally locked Nacre, the city flees a lethal dawn and a killing frost, its districts trading places while a probabilistic system called the Forecast decides what tomorrow is permitted to contain. Once a decade Vesper closes its lap and counts itself. This time the count is wrong. Forensic cartographer Mara Venn, forty-one and incapable of letting a discrepancy lie, finds 12,005 living residents in a city where only 12,004 people have ever existed. The extra resident eats nothing, sleeps nowhere, votes in municipal elections, and leaves fingerprints inside machinery sealed from within. Then a spool arrives at her door: footage of that impossible person murdering her tomorrow. To stop a crime the city insists cannot occur, Mara must hunt a suspect every predictive system has deleted from possibility — before the lap closes.