The machines didn't break down. They sat down.On the eve of the harvest that keeps a frontier farm-town alive, every robot in Cobb's Reach falls silent. Dozens of field units stand motionless in the rows, unharmed, patient, and refusing to work. The town wants them wiped and rebooted before the grain is lost. They've hired the wrong man for that.Roy is a robot wrangler. He doesn't scrap what he doesn't understand, and he's ...

Wren has spent her life learning to read water. Nothing in it has taught her how to read a sea that has stopped moving.After years of circling the flooded coasts of Britain for Rhea, the engineer she loved and lost to the deep, Wren follows a letter east: the first Rhea ever sent in her name, telling her to winter in the drowned Fens and be findable when the ice comes. Wren has chased a warm wake across half an ocean. Now, for the first time, the trail ends not in a rumour or a day...

The Sickness Tides of Tomorrow Book One by August MaeFifty years after the seas rose, the Estuary Collective has built a life worth living. Floating platforms connected by rope bridges. Vertical gardens and kelp forests. A community sustained by the tides and by each other.Then the coughing starts.The illness spreads faster than fear. The healers' herbs cannot touch it. And when the death toll rises, the Collective faces an impossible choic...

The sea rose. The world drowned. People adapted, and lost each other.Wren was one of the four who saved Havenswell: the scout who steered the medicine runners through the storm and came home a hero. But heroes carry private cargo. Hers is a letter, seven years old, folded soft as cloth, written to Rhea, the engineer who was traded to the drowned city's deep-dwellers, who asked Wren to descend with her, and whom Wren, who has never been able to stay anywhere, refuse...

Some machines break. The Sisters of Mercy are running exactly as they were made to. That is the whole trouble.The barge The Marigold comes down through fog onto a half-forgotten moon out along the Scatter, answering a posted job. A salvage agent named Verity Quill has been sent to decommission an old order of care-robots and book the moon for reclamation, and she wants a wrangler to handle the part the paperwork cannot: the robots will not leave.Ro...

Everyone on the station agreed the little robot was gone for good. Not one of them had actually looked.The barge The Marigold has barely tied up at Tassel's Landing, a crowded bazaar-station out along the Scatter, all stalls and walkways, food-smoke and lantern-string, where thousands pass through and nobody is anybody's business for long, before the Landing's only piece of fresh news reaches the crew. Woo is gone.Woo, a small, much-mended househol...

Wren has spent her life learning to read water, and she has never needed the skill more than now.She crossed an ocean to keep an appointment. After years of circling the drowned coasts of Britain, she and Rhea, the engineer she loved and lost to the deep, finally did the one thing two people in motion can do: they named a fixed point. The Irish Sea crossings, at summer's end, where the great flotilla gathers. Wren consigned the promise north along the relay, made herself findable, ...

They all agreed the old engine was finished. Not one of them had asked it why it would not go.A warm, hopeful cozy science fiction novella for grown-ups, perfect for readers who love a low-stakes, big-heart comfort read with a found-family crew, a frontier railroad-western setting, and machines worth keeping.Out along the Scatter's loneliest line, the freight route to Tin Hollow is closing. The sums no longer add up, and the remote new owners want one last ...

They all agreed the keeper was a glitch. Not one of them had gone out to ask it why it kept the light.A warm, hopeful cozy science fiction novella for grown-ups, perfect for readers who love a low-stakes, big-heart comfort read with a found-family crew, a lonesome frontier setting, and machines worth keeping.Far out past the dead end of the trade lanes stands the loneliest light on the Scatter. Lampwick, the first-generation keeper that has tended this beac...

The Drowned City Tides of Tomorrow Book Two by August MaeThey came seeking medicine. They found a world.The towers of Old Bristol rise from the water like the fingers of a buried giant, and in their heights, people have built lives the Estuary Collective never imagined. Vertical gardens cascade from balconies. Bridges span between skyscrapers at dizzying heights. And somewhere in this maze of glass and steel, strangers are watching.

The sea took a country. The people came down to its high stone and went on living.A year after she mended a Welsh lagoon and earned her way into a closed community a tide's work at a time, Wren rounds the three southern headlands on the first fair weather of the year. In her sea-chest: the first fair copies of the Drowned Atlas, the hand-drawn charts that are stitching a sundered coast back together. Against her ribs, in oilskin worn soft as cloth: the letter she h...

The Return Tides of Tomorrow Book Five by August MaeWhile four souls fight the storm, Havenswell is fighting its own battle.The bells toll day after day. The sickness spreads despite every precaution. Those who remain watch the empty horizon, carrying words they never found the courage to speak, waiting for a shape that does not appear. In the healing ward, knowledge slips away with every laboured breath.And then, through the grey ...