0.48. That was the real number. Cora typed 0.73 and saved the lie. Two forty-seven in the morning, July in the Bitterroot, the cicadas sawing through the dark, and the cursor blinks at her like it knows exactly what she's done. A wolf pack needs a genetic viability score of 0.65 to survive three generations without collapse. Hers doesn't have it. So she rounded. She told herself it was a decimal point's drift, an honest mistake. She buried it deep. Because the Right to Rewild Act has a sunset clause, and if anyone sees the truth, the wolves stay in their holding pens forever while the rustgut spreads through the dying pines and the soil-regeneration clock ticks toward zero. She's already burned through two extensions. This is the last chance the valley gets. Then the knock comes hard enough to rock the trailer on its hinges. "One of your wolves killed a steer." Cole O'Malley stands in his truck's headlights, a rancher's jaw set tight as cracked granite. But Cora checked the GPS collars at midnight. All six wolves were inside the fence, every signal blinking green. Something out there tore the throat out of two thousand pounds of prime Hereford. And according to everything she knows, it wasn't supposed to be possible. As a journalist starts pulling threads, a rancher offers a bargain, and the rot spreads faster than the new growth, Cora's small lie metastasizes into something that could sink the whole project, and her with it. A rewilded valley fighting to come back to life. A half-drowned city downstream. A storm gathering at the edge of everything she's given her life to save. To finally do right by the wilderness she loves, Cora has to decide whether the truth is worth losing everything, before the dam, the fire, and her own buried data come for them all. The Rewilding is a visionary, elegiac climate novel about ecological restoration, a buried lie, a rancher's reckoning, a drowning world, and the family the storm couldn't break. Perfect for readers who love literary cli-fi, near-future eco-thrillers, morally complex scientists, wilderness and wildlife stakes, and the sweep of The Overstory or the urgency of The Water Will Come. A standalone speculative novel.
