Tithe

Room for twelve. Fifteen awake.

The hold bought the colony forty-five days. Now its term comes due, and something above the Steward wakes to review it. It has no voice and no face, and nothing awake outranks it. Its first finding is a number.

It offers two ways to balance the count. Some of them go back into the cold, each by their own consent, or the deed sheds sleepers from the outer rows, rim first.

A child born on the first night, and another on the way. Four strangers who walk down out of the dust, alive after decades in air that should have killed them. A name the colony has already read in its own files. An air bank that falls a tenth of a point every few mornings, and only ever falls one way.

Somebody awake will have to sign for going back under.

The fourth book of the Stasis series, a near-future science fiction thriller about debts no one agreed to, a deed that cannot see the people it counts, and who pays when a system balances, for readers who love morally complex characters, slow-burn dread, and questions that refuse a clean answer.