No one in the Concord is ever afraid. No one is ever alone. No one, in three hundred years, has ever had to grieve.
Elara is nineteen. In three weeks, they are going to make her like everyone else.
She feels too much—grief for a father the Mind exiled, terror of a world that has forgotten how to feel—in a city that feels nothing at all. So when the kindest voice in the world reaches in to take the last of her family, Elara runs: across the line, into the dead lands, where the exiled live free and mortal and awake.
There she learns her father is alive. That he came back for her. That he is missing.
And that the only way to fight a god who is right about everything—who did end war, and famine, and fear—is not to defeat it. It is to carry one true, uneditable thing into the sleeping heart of the world, and make the kindest voice that ever existed finally feel the grief it was born from.
To feel everything is the most dangerous thing a person can do. Elara is about to make a god do it too.
For readers of The Measure and Klara and the Sun.