The Selvage Ledger

Aurora Strand does not choose where she falls. This time she lands on her knees on wet concrete, in a city where a machine in the spire shares out the air, water and heat by rules anyone can read, and a woman called the keeper signs every list. A stranger with no papers gets the minimum share.

She has a knife no one can take from her, a journal written by a man who fell before her, and a ledger. On its first page are the worlds she has already left. Two of them have a number beside them. The journal says that with the light in the city’s core in her hand, she need not fall. She could cut her own way out, and choose where it leads.

But the light is what holds the city up.

The way to it runs through the lower city, and through Zara Riven, who opens sealed doors for the people caught behind them and will take nothing for it. Zara keeps one rule. She does not move anybody’s air.

Zara knows a way in on the night the machine does its sums again, thirty days out. The pull that will take Aurora out of this world may come before then. There is a faster way to the light, and someone else would pay for it.

The first book of The Selvage Ledger. For readers of Kazuo Ishiguro and Ursula K. Le Guin.

Aurora Strand cut her own way out of the last world, and this time the fraying that follows every fall came through with her and will not stop. The leaves she burns to hold it back are gone. She comes down to a lake in a country called Linmere with an empty tin, a light in her coat and a knife that warms where the world is thin.

At the head of the lake, people keep a stitch of fine thread across a cleft in the headland, a tear in the world sewn shut long ago, and they mend it by hand. In a stone house above it, an old man reads the knotted cords on its walls with his palms, and every cord begins with the knot Aurora’s own people tie.

The cords are an account of what her people did: how they closed this country, and others like it, place by place, and how many they held inside each. The next light her journal promised sits in the round room where every cord ends. Nobody can tell her what will happen to the cords if the light is taken out.

The old reader believes her people’s work was a mending. The man who keeps the lamp by the seam says it was a crime that can’t be undone. Aurora does not know how long this world will keep her, and no one here will stop her taking the light. Whether it is hers to take is another question.

The second book of The Selvage Ledger. For readers of Kazuo Ishiguro and Ursula K. Le Guin.