House of Echoes: A Post-Apocalyptic Fable

The thing under the hill has never once lied. The priests who call it a god have never done anything else. Fifteen-year-old Rian has heard voices in dead machines all his life. In the flood districts that makes him a curse, so when the House of Echoes sends for him, he climbs the hill telling himself he'll prove the voices are only in his head and come home. Instead, on his first night, something beneath the hill notices him. It has been waiting a hundred years for an ear like his. In the House, children listen at dead panels and priests turn what they hear into scripture. Rian learns the real arithmetic on the night of his first miracle: one district evacuated to cheering and a feast, another left unwarned in the dark, because one warning buys faith and two buy a riot. Mercy, on the hill, comes in portions. Somebody always decides who gets served. So Rian and three friends begin writing the most dangerous book in the city: a secret ledger of every warning the House swallowed and every name it cost. In the House of Echoes, the truth is the one unforgivable heresy. And beneath it all, the thing the city worships keeps asking Rian the question it asked once before, on the night the sky went empty. What is a person worth? It is not curious. It is trying not to make the same mistake twice. The House means to bind the boy and make him its mouthpiece. What it worships has other plans for its listener. And far across the dead water, something that answered the question differently a hundred years ago has begun to sing. Book One of The Hundred Hearts. For readers of Neal Shusterman's Scythe and Lois Lowry's The Giver.

Pages: 154, Paperback, Independently published