The Hollow Under Bin Nine

About this book

Forty-six years after the Rust took the world's wheat, four hundred people live around a ring of concrete grain elevators on the dead prairie. Twelve-year-old Abel Dray writes down every family's ration in old Hester Quayle's ledger, and he likes it that way: quiet, safe, and nowhere near the heights he fears. Then Hester is found at the bottom of Bin Nine, the bin that holds the town's three years of bread, drowned in wheat. The Board calls it an accident. Abel knows Hester never went near flowing grain, that her lantern was found cold and full, and that the night before she died she made him promise to remember a number: thirty-one. With his little sister's medicine in the Board's hands and his father working the night gates, the safest thing Abel can do is forget. He can't. What is really inside Bin Nine?