The False Summit

The whole world is cheering. They think they've reached the top. They've reached a false summit.The man everyone believed was pulling the strings has fallen - stormed, exposed, dragged into the light while a battered world roars that it has finally won. Mara Vance knows better. She has followed the money past him, to the rung above, and the rung above that. The financier they toppled was never the top. He was a step the real architect left standing to be found, so that the celebration would cover the retreat.There is a hand still above the summit, and it prepared for this. It has always prepared for everything - including who dies, and when, and what their deaths are made to mean. Mara is starting to understand that the machine does not merely erase people. It curates their endings.She is running out of time to climb the last rung. The dying she has carried for a year is written on her now, plain for anyone to read, and everyone who has ever gotten close to her has paid for it. And then, near the end, the cruelest thing the machine has done yet: it lets her believe she might live. The summit was false. The cost was not.THE FALSE SUMMIT is Book Nine of PROVENANCE, the series about identity, trust, and the death of proof. For readers of literary dystopia and slow-burn surveillance thrillers.