Original AI-generated book

The Saltspine Bargain

About this book

The Great Salt Expanse was once the American heartland. Now it is a glittering crust of poison left by the Climate Sundering, and the only law that moves across it is the slow crawl of the mobile salt-rigs, grinding down through the crust after the last freshwater aquifers. Clan loyalty is currency. Water debt is inheritance. And once in a generation a body is born that turns the poison into a living instrument. Rhea Solis, twenty-nine, is one of those bodies. A jagged lattice of salt crystals erupts from her lower spine like a second, agonizing backbone, and when the pain is bad enough she can taste water veins a hundred kilometers off. Every use buys her clan another season and costs her some unnamed portion of her life, driving the crystals deeper toward her heart. She is the Solis Rig's prophesied heir and she wants nothing to do with the prophecy; she would rather be down in the valve trench with a wrench in her fist and her half-feral younger brother swearing at her from the catwalk. Then a killer salt-storm nearly rolls the rig, Rhea is forced to taste deeper than she ever has, and something impossible surfaces in the shape of her crystals: coordinates. Her mother, Captain Mara Solis, iron-haired and three fingers short from old debts, does not see a daughter. She sees dynasty, leverage, and a price. A rival fleet is willing to pay it. A hired drill-hand who came aboard under a false name is willing to kill for it. And Rhea's brother has spent twenty-two years being told he is the ordinary one. Told in strictly linear, rotating close third-person across the family, the fleet that wants to buy them, and the scavengers who want them dead, this is a hard, tactile, body-horror drama about water, blood price, and whether family is a chain or a choice.