The Screaming Wire

Nine strangers are waiting in the dark, and the only man who knew the way over the mountain is dead.

Trish Haddad is a clerk, which is to say she is exact, careful, and never entirely at ease in company. When the registrar who guides her networks refugees freezes on the Corvane Pass with his snowshoe bindings cut, the only person who can read the warlords ledger is the toll clerk who let her people through for free.

Vartan "Socca" Hovsepian has balanced the books of a dangerous man for four winters and never once asked what the numbers bought. Now every line he wrote is a name, and one of them belonged to a friend of hers. Together they must break a cipher hidden in the middle names of newborns, keep a nightly radio roll-call alive, and decide whether to trust each other or run.

But the radio does something it should not do between stations. It shows Trish a hall forty-six winters away, half empty, where an old woman is reading names aloud in Trishs own voice.

Who you save is a choice. Who you remember is another one.