The Awakening

On June 24th, 2132, twenty-three things wake up at the places where the leylines cross. Nineteen of them will stop answering, and none of them will ring when they go. Cole Jones spent eleven years being the presentable half of a family whose other half stockpiled water and talked about seals and sleepers. His mother turned out to be right. He'd always assumed that would fix something. Now he's eighteen in a redwood valley in Marin, with a channel opened in an afternoon, an arm the opening took, and a crystal six days old that prices everything it teaches. A spark costs half a unit. Practice gets it down to a tenth. His ceiling is thirteen and a half, and Muir tells him early what that number is going to do: You will not become stronger. You will become expensive to run out of. Those are not the same, and the second is worth more. By October the ceiling reads twelve and a half. He knows why, and he hasn't told anyone. By December, a hundred and nineteen people are counting person-days on a barn wall, the water line is lost under a hill nobody surveyed, and the eighteen-year-old keeping the valley's only written record has started checking the crystal's answers against her own columns. She doesn't think it's lying. She thinks it's certain and wrong, and can't tell the difference from the inside. Nothing out there is hunting them. Whatever emptied the map went past twice without knowing they were there. That turns out to be worse. A post-apocalyptic progression fantasy about ledgers, margins, and the cost of being the only person who knows something. The numbers are real, they get audited, and they mostly go down. For readers of Super Supportive and The Wandering Inn.