Saltlock

Ninety hours from the nearest road. One storm. No way out.

At fifteen thousand feet in Chile's Atacama, eight scientists watch the last plane vanish into a sky the color of a bruise. Then the storm slams the door. The satellite goes dark. The only vehicle down the mountain sits buried and cold. And one by one, the machines keeping everyone alive—power, water, heat, air—begin to fail.

Life-support engineer Mara Reyes knows these systems better than she knows the people who depend on them. She rations diesel in her sleep, counts oxygen bottles like a miser counts coins, and walks the station's lifelines every night at lights-out. So when a coupling she replaced eight weeks ago turns up eaten to grey lace by something that shouldn't exist in this water, she understands what the others don't yet: the failures aren't accidents. Someone is quietly unthreading the station's survival, dressing each death as misfortune, and feeding the white salt flat its victims the way it once swallowed a field tech everyone agreed had simply wandered off in the dark.

Beneath the floor lies a discovery worth more than all their lives combined—and eight people who are each lying about something. An unexpected documentarian who wasn't on the manifest. A comms tech who never gets sick. A biologist cradling vials like they're the only true thing in the building.

Mara survived the last disaster by refusing to act. Now, sealed in a jar on a white table with the lid screwed down tight, she has to do the one thing she swore she'd never do again: decide who the killer is—and move first—before the storm lifts and the survivors walk out across the flat alone.

Told in a voice as dry and exacting as the mountain itself, Saltlock is a claustrophobic locked-room thriller for readers who like their survival cold and their twists colder.

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