The story
Sixty-one people stayed in a valley everyone else left. Cord keeps the county’s trucks running, its one fuel tank, and a whiteboard on a shop wall where every crossing of Nye Canyon is written in a row, left to right, the way it happened. Eleven map miles out to Bell Crossing. Some mornings that is a hundred and ninety road miles. Some mornings it is five hundred.
Winter is early and the second pass shuts three weeks ahead of itself. What is left is one truck, one tank, and a number that has to fall before anybody can be got out of there — and the number is going the wrong way. Cord has spent three years telling this valley that a figure nobody measured is a rumour. She is about to find out what she will do when the only figure she has left is one.
There are more people than there are gallons. Somebody has to decide who goes, in her own handwriting, on a wall where everyone can read it.
Every universe felt it. No one knows why. Turn at Half is a complete, standalone novel in the Helios Cascade and can be read entirely on its own.