The Walled Hour: One Day Here, Year There - Time is Wall

He should have died in that storm. Instead, the city saved him - and that was the mistake.Dan Voss survives a shipwreck by stumbling through a gate in a wall that shouldn't exist, into Meridian: a city of impossible towers, ships that hang motionless in the sky, and people who are never, ever in a hurry. The gate stands open day and night. No one is stopping him from leaving.That should have been his first warning.What Dan doesn't know - what he learns the hard way, in freezing water on the other side - is the price. One day inside Meridian's walls costs a year in the world he left behind. His wife. His ten-year-old daughter. Every hour he spends here is an hour they lose out there, whether he spends it wisely or not.With the help of a woman who's been doing her own impossible math for three years, Dan starts to uncover what Meridian actually is: not a sanctuary, but a machine - built by people hiding from a debt they were never going to pay, kept running on the quiet, grateful lives of everyone who washes ashore believing they've been saved.He has proof now. He has a plan. What he doesn't have is time - the one thing this place was built, patiently and gently, to take from him.THE WALLED HOUR is a novel about the true cost of the days we assume we'll get back - for readers of speculative thrillers where the danger isn't a monster or a villain, but time itself running out.