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.
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Chapter 1: Two Hundred and Eleven
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About this book
Turn at Half 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 books. Each is set in a different world and written in 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 one book that tells what really happened, and it can be read before this one, after it, or not at all.
Content note
This novel deals throughout with scarcity, isolation, and the decisions people make when there is not enough of something to go around. It includes the death of a child from exposure, which happens off the page and is not described, and the aftermath of a suicide referred to in passing. There is no sexual content and little profanity.
