The story
Since the night the dreaming began, one person in forty-five thousand has dreamed the same city every night: sunken stone halls under the southern ice, lit by a blue that comes from nowhere, where nothing casts a shadow. Agnes is seventy, retired from forty-four years of drilling ice for the Austral Charter Company, and she files her view with the Register every morning like a weather report. Her son Callum took his as a summons. He is one of 212 Undersleepers on the high plateau: dreamers who went south to be near the city, and stopped waking.
Now the Company means to drill 1,640 metres down to that city, fast, with hot water, three kilometres from Callum’s bed. Agnes knows what that ice does when you hurry it. So she takes the drill herself.
But the nearer a dreamer sleeps to the Pole, the longer the dream keeps her. Every metre she gains costs her nights. And when the bit breaks through, every dreamer’s window in the world moves at once.
Under the ice, the city has been keeping watch.
Every universe felt it. No one knows why. The Undersleep is a complete standalone novel and needs no other book to be read.
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Chapter 1: The Window
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About this book
The Undersleep is a complete, standalone novel. You do not need to have read any other Helios Cascade book to read this one, and this one will not spoil any of them.
The series is built out of standalone science-fiction novels. Each is set in a different world and crossed with a different genre, and they share no plot and no characters. What they share is a single moment: the instant reality began to change, everywhere at once, in more worlds than anyone could count. Every book is one world’s story of living after it.
There is no reading order, with one exception: the first three books are a single continuous story and are read in order. The Pruning is the origin, the book that tells what really happened, and it can be read before this one, after it, or not at all.
Content note
This novel is cosmic horror. It contains sustained dread, people who sleep and do not wake, among them the narrator’s son, danger from cold and altitude, and a frostbite injury. Deaths are mentioned in the past. There is no sexual content and no strong language.
