Books by C. W. Lindmere

Seventeen years ago, the world wasn't destroyed. It was dismantled.

The Bloom consumed power grids, poisoned industry, and turned cities into living ecosystems. Humanity survived only by learning to build with biology instead of machines.

Dr. Mara Vale has spent her life doing exactly that.

Then a dying stranger reaches her settlement carrying a message grown inside his body.

COME HOME.

The handwriting belongs to Mara's mother—dead since the Bloom.

To uncover the truth, Mara must return to Bellweather, the Appalachian town she escaped as a child. A town the new world somehow never managed to destroy.

Beneath Bellweather waits the remains of Project Mycelium.

And something far older. Something that remembers humanity. Something that once decided civilization could not be allowed to continue.

Now it is preparing to make another choice.

Humanity survived the Bloom.

Now it can't agree on what humanity should become.

Some embrace living technology and neural symbiosis. Others would rather burn every trace of Mycelium from the Earth. And a new movement has begun engineering people for a future evolution never intended to create.

Mara Vale wanted to give humanity a choice.

Instead, she helped give it a thousand.

Then the oceans begin going silent.

Mycelial networks vanish along the coast. Marine life moves with impossible coordination. Black structures appear inside the bodies of the dead.

Something ancient is waking beneath the sea. Mycelium calls it the Unseparated.

It doesn't infect.

It doesn't conquer.

It simply incorporates everything it encounters.

And now it has discovered humanity.

Mara Vale remembers dying four hundred million years ago.

She remembers forests that vanished before humanity existed.

She remembers people she has never met.

And lately, she remembers a sky that does not belong to Earth.

As the Unseparated spreads through the oceans, humanity's only hope may lie within Deep Memory—ancient biological archives containing the experiences of life across geological time.

Mara was engineered to enter those memories without losing herself.

But the deeper she goes, the less certain she becomes that every thought inside her mind is her own.

And buried in Mycelium's oldest memories is a secret it has hidden from humanity.

The war consuming Earth did not begin with the Bloom. It did not begin with humanity. It may not have begun on Earth at all.

Eight years crawled or exploded past. Earth was a new blooming core world.

The Lineage endured, as we have always. Mycelia have been discovered across new lands. I share our first contact and what comes next, and mycelium offers the first large gene transfer across taxa.

The Aurora gene shifts humanity in all directions.

DO NOT CONNECT.

New life spills from corridors that no team has charted, or seen evolution in. The skin sheds. Again.

So much is new, and so much we can't or won't see. It's a world we live in, and we remain in balance with what some point within the web to what's next.

This is all more so, and so much else in future yet untold, to come.

A correction says the book was wrong. A strike says the world was wrong.

Maelin Reeve has been an Imperial Enumerator for eleven years, and this is her first Great Census. Thirty days before the lock, a widow tells her about a hamlet up the Velrun road. The road book has no such place. Neither does the tax copy, the temple copy, or the twelve years of ledgers behind them. Six households remember it. Not one record admits it.

Somebody has taken a village out of the world, and what erasure leaves behind does not stay where it was put. In the Northmarch the officially denied dead walk home to households that buried them. A diplomat petitions the Empire for permission to exist. A thief with no entry in any book steals a packet he cannot safely read. And a hunter who has killed the Struck for twenty-two years is beginning to recognize them.

Maelin joined the Register because records were supposed to keep people from disappearing. She has thirty days to find out what it was built to do instead.

Book One of a four-book cycle.