The story
Vennland has never buried its dead. The Church of the Return keeps the ones whose families can pay in cold galleries, to wait for the day each soul comes home to its own flesh. Anselm Tiede reads their breath. Four hundred and ten of them lie on steel racks under his house, held at one degree, and his mother is in Row F. Her ledger asked him for the old way. He put her in the Cold anyway.
One visiting Sunday his oldest friend, a canal bargeman, parts his drowned daughter’s hair to show him the roots. Lise was fair all her life. She is coming in dark, and her thumbprint no longer matches her card.
The ones kept longest have finished mending. They have not stopped. What they are growing now is not their own, and the Church already has a holy name for it.
Anselm has a stopwatch, a university pathologist the Church won’t let through its doors, and a law that calls cutting one of the Waiting a crime. By his own figures, his mother finishes healing in the first week of February.
Every universe felt it. No one knows why. Where the Dead Are Kept is a complete standalone novel and needs no other book to be read.
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Chapter 1: Visiting Sunday
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About this book
Where the Dead Are Kept 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
Body horror involving the dead, the death of a parent, a teenage drowning in the backstory, and frostbite. No sexual content; little strong language.
