In the near future, a resistance operative chronicles her work as a young journalist in rural Pennsylvania forty-five years earlier, when a nefarious corporation's plan to control the East Coast's aquifers led to the first fracture in the collapse of the United States.
If no one records this, it never happened.
When the seventh farmer turns up dead in his field, journalist Grace Washington returns home to rural Pennsylvania to investigate. The most recent victim's farm neighbors that of her estranged father, Samuel Tate, who believes the deaths are connected to a nebulous company that monitors wells and uses the data to force families from their farms. Like all its language, the company's name is optimized with a nonstick sheen: Verdant Resource Management.
As Grace digs deeper into Verdant's goals, she uncovers a plot more sinister, extensive, and dangerous than she initially imagined. But even as the corporate web closes around her, a resistance is taking shape, one that will carry a mantle older than the republic. One that burns unreadable symbols into the earth. One whose name the regime will spend the next half-century trying to incinerate from every archive, every record, every living memory it can reach. Yet the land remembers even when humans are made to forget.
The first book in the Thirteen Fractures series, House of Dust introduces a haunting dystopian vision that traces a path from performative speech and weaponized bureaucracy to the biological clock of an empire measuring its final minutes-and plants the seed of a resistance that will fight to preserve humanity in the face of its own destruction.
