The ground beneath the Sump is trembling, and Andy already knows what that means.
He's learned to read this place through his boots. Every board, every current, every voice that changes pitch a half-second before panic sets in. He knows where to step and when to run. What he cannot read is Renee, standing at the edge of a puddle that is already trembling before anything touches it, looking at him like an inventory that doesn't add up.
When the market catches fire and something enormous begins moving through the lowlands, Andy leads a fractured group of survivors upward, outward, away. Across a river that eats the slow and the unlucky. Through a wasteland that conducts lightning into glass. Into a quarry village that offers warmth and food and walls that hold, and asks only one small, monstrous thing in return.
THE EXODUS is not a story about monsters. It is a story about math. About what a group of exhausted, grieving, half-starved people will agree to when survival is on one side of the scale and someone else's suffering is on the other. It is about Mireille, who carries a dying child because putting him down is a rehearsal she refuses to perform. About Luc, who has always trusted his own weight, right until the moment the ground decides it's had enough. About Maurice, who is never wrong, and never forgiven for it. And about Renee, who can feel the earth thinking, right up until she can't feel anything at all.
