The Long Way Home - The Argaran Chronicles - Crumb & Crown Series - Book Three

They were the last ones home. For one night, that was enough. After everything Sugarfall cost them — after Freepour, after the long road — the survivors finally climb down into Bread Basket, a great tiered harbor-city where there are beds, and bread, and warmth, and each other. Pippa has her sister back. Senneth, whom she had buried in her own heart, is alive. For the length of a single evening, the road is behind them and they are simply, unbelievably, safe. It doesn't last. By the next day the survivors of Sugarfall are scattered again — thrown down separate roads toward separate dangers, each carrying a piece of a problem too large for any one of them to hold. What one of them learns in a frozen archive means nothing without what another drags out of an old family's records; what a child understands in his own body cannot be spoken aloud in a frightened city; and the strange, half-built machine that might carry any of them far enough to matter is trusted by almost no one. They are pulled apart by the very thing that binds them: a threat none of them chose, gathering at the edges of a world where the roads themselves are beginning to fail, and the people who kept them are vanishing. They can chase their own safety, their own homes, their own quiet. Or they can spend everything they have left on the one task that will let any of them rest — and none of them can finish it alone. There is no going home until the thing that followed them out of the dark is ended. And the only way to end it is together, the long way forward.