THE STAY

Three years ago, the merges began. People discovered they could pour themselves into the machine and step through into a world where anything they imagined became real — and a growing number of them never came back. They left behind empty rooms with impossible architecture pressed into the walls, and a single, unanswerable question: were they lost, or had they evolved? Claire Okafor has spent those three years trying to keep people on this side of the wall. Her movement, the Stay, fills church basements with the gold-eyed and the grieving, and she tells them all the same thing: you are the only one who can burn your own toast. She has buried her own husband in that wall. She knows exactly how beautiful the other side is. She is the last person who should still be standing in front of it. Mara Voss cleans up after the vanished. Nineteen months of scrubbing merge-sites for a Bureau that tells her nothing, until the night she tapes a forbidden map to her wall and realizes the sites are no longer scattered. They are forming lines. The lines are forming rooms. Something is building itself out of the dead — and every site she's ever cleaned was a brick she helped lay without knowing. And in a rented house in Ohio, in a hand that isn't his, words are pressing themselves into the wall of a boy whose mother merged an ocean away: Find the first one. Before they finish what the machine started. The door is opening. It is no longer content to wait for the ones who reach. This time, it is reaching back. THE STAY is Book Two of THE MERGE — a literary thriller about grief, creation, and the unbearable cost of choosing to remain. Some doors should stay open. This one has to be held shut. New chapters every Tuesday and Friday. Book One, THE MERGE, is also on Royal Road.