locations
The Outer Registry
Nine surviving settlements and a legal fiction.
Forthcoming
The Shooter
One shot. Three centuries of ash.
Synopsis
Kesh Andrun has spent eleven years as the quietest instrument of an administration that outlived the world it was built to serve. When the Outer Registry — nine surviving settlements and a legal fiction holding them together — begins to fracture, a single name is placed in his hands. He does what he was made for. What follows is not a manhunt but an inheritance: of testimony, of silence, and of the machinery that turns one act in a dying world into a founding myth. The Shooter is a novel about the distance between an event and its history, and the people who live in the gap.
Sample chapter
Chapter One — The Long Room
The room had been designed for a telescope and had never held one. Kesh liked it for that: a space still shaped around an instrument that never arrived, its mounting ring polished by nothing but the hands of people waiting.\n\nHe set the case down and did not open it.\n\nThrough the aperture the station's outer ring turned with the patience of something that had forgotten it was machinery. Somewhere beneath his feet, four thousand people were arguing about water rights, and in eleven hours one of them would stop.\n\nHe had been told the name twice. He had asked for it a third time and been refused, which told him more than the name had.
Characters
Who walks the road
The Shooter
Kesh Andrun
A registry marksman with eleven years of service and no surviving supervisor. Precise, unromantic, and increasingly aware that he is being written down.
Registrar of the Outer Compact
Isabeau Cray
She signs the orders she does not read and reads the ones she will not sign. The Cycle's conscience, and its most dangerous archivist.
Fleet Advocate
Ovan Teel
Convoy-born lawyer arguing for four wandering generations against an institution that regards them as an accounting error.
Unnamed
The Witness
The only person in the long room who was not supposed to be there. Every later century has a different name for her.
The world
What remains
The Fall was not an explosion. It was a withdrawal — of power, of harvest, of anyone answering. What remains is the Outer Registry: nine settlements, four road-fleets, and an accounting method that outlived its ledger.
locations
Kalanthe Station
Where the long room is.
politics
The Drift Compacts
Treaties written by people who will never meet.
politics
The Road-Fleets
Four generations without a wall.
technology
Cold-Cycle Settlements
Life measured in maintenance.
technology
The Ballistics of Distance
Violence at the speed of arithmetic.
Questions
About the book
- When will The Shooter be published?
- The manuscript is in structural edit. A publication date will be announced to newsletter subscribers first.
- What does reserving a copy commit me to?
- Nothing. A reservation costs nothing and can be cancelled at any time. It signals demand and guarantees you are contacted first when copies exist.
- Will there be an audiobook?
- An audiobook edition is planned. Narrator casting will be shared in the journal.
- Is The Shooter a standalone novel?
- It is complete in itself and it opens The Shooter Cycle, a three-century post-apocalyptic sequence. You can stop after one book. Most readers will not.
- Will the book be translated?
- Translation rights are available. Enquiries go through the contact page.
Reserve
Set a copy aside.
Nothing is charged. Reservations simply tell the print run how many readers are waiting.
From the journal
Notes on the writing
· Writing updates
The long room took nine drafts
The opening chapter of The Shooter was rewritten nine times before it stopped explaining itself.
· Research
Research notes: living in cold orbit
Three weeks of reading rotation-habitat engineering so that one paragraph could sound inevitable.
· Deleted scenes
A deleted scene from Book One
Isabeau Cray once had a brother. He survived four drafts.