THE HOLLOWING

The coffee is still warm when the world ends.Dr. Maya Rivera has spent fourteen months exiled at a remote research station on Mount Bachelor, haunted by the dangerous results she once concealed. Her genetically engineered fungus, OC-17, was designed to destroy agricultural pests without harming anything else.But OC-17 has evolved.When communications suddenly fail, Maya discovers her colleagues standing motionless throughout the station-alive, breathing, and smiling as pale fungal threads emerge from their bodies. Far below the mountain, the city of Bend has fallen silent. Maya is forced to confront an unbearable truth: the organism she helped create has escaped, and humanity may already be losing the fight.Joined by Cade Walker, a firefighter carrying losses of his own, Maya ventures through abandoned cities, forests filled with infected survivors, and enormous fungal Nests pulsing with a shared intelligence. The fungus is no longer merely controlling its victims. It is connecting their memories, voices, and minds into something new-something that promises to end loneliness, fear, and death forever.As the infection spreads across the world, Maya discovers a possible weapon. Using it could preserve humanity's freedom-but at a cost almost too horrifying to comprehend.To save what remains of the human race, Maya must decide what truly makes someone human: the body, the memory, the freedom to choose-or the fragile boundary separating one mind from another.The world is ending.And it wants her to join it.