The Weight of Light

Seven hundred metres beneath a burned ocean, the last city of humankind keeps its mouth clean and its faith intact. It has to. In the Hearth, the loop is closed. Nothing is wasted, no one is nobody, and the dying are not simply lost—they are Ascended, lifted up by the Keepers toward a healed and sunlit world that waits above the black for those who prove worthy.

Nineteen-year-old Sela Roan believes this the way she believes the cold. She dives the freezing skin of the colony, clearing the great intake grille so the farms can breathe, chasing the deep-name that would buy her gas-fragile little brother a warmer place to sleep. She counts her breaths against the dark. She keeps her small secrets like coals.

Then her glove catches on something that ticks—a dead woman's name-bead, wedged in a farm intake that should carry nothing but water. A bead should never be in the water. A bead goes up, holy and slow, toward the Sunfields. This one came from the Mouth, the valved dark no one dives and no one names at table. And the current that runs from the Mouth runs here. Toward the mussel-runs. Toward the food.

One frayed cord, and the whole story the Hearth tells itself to survive begins to unravel—the road to the sun, the colony's most sacred rite, the mercy that holds every soul together. With her brother marked for the next Ascension, Sela must decide what a people owe the truth when the truth could starve them all.

A door has stayed shut for a hundred and fifty years. Opening it could bring everyone home—or destroy them. But can it be opened slowly enough, honestly enough, to let them climb toward the light without the fall?

Marin Holloway's debut is a haunting, hopeful descent into faith, survival, and the terrible cost of hope. For readers who crave dystopian fiction with a beating heart.

Dive into the Hearth today.