Three novels about a device that holds people where they are, and the people who keep the record of what that costs.
Every Sunday the device asks:
That word is where the trilogy starts.
Book one. New Orleans.
Patrick Jurisich has a device behind his ear that keeps him level and a wife who reads people from one detail outward, and she has begun to read him. Getting off it is a fourteen-month protocol the company controls. Getting off it without the company knowing is something else: a prosthetist's basement, a swim cap, a woman in a records closet, and a storm.
Start here.
Book two. Salt Lake City.
Three years later the company has learned to ask. The second-generation device checks on its subjects every Sunday and logs the answer where no one can change it. Nine hundred and forty new mothers write the same word. One of them is the wife of the man who sold it, and she has not been afraid in seven weeks, and her baby has stopped looking at her face.
Stands alone.
Book three. Fort Moore, Georgia.
Forty soldiers, one device paired to all of them, a platoon that moves like a flock and closes around a gap in under a second. A nineteen-year-old from Houma signed because his friend signed first. A chaplain who used to build pumps asks him one question every Thursday. His mother hears a word on the phone that isn't his, learns to sew, and starts writing down the times.
Stands alone.
All three books in one volume, for less than the price of two.
Read in order, or start anywhere; each stands on its own. Together they follow nine years and three generations of an instrument that holds people where they are, told in the voices of the people it happened to.
From The Compass, chapter 1.
He called on the Fourth of July at ten after six, which was the time he always called, because chow was at five-thirty and the phones came out after, and she had the notebook on the counter before the phone rang, because a man in Algiers had told her to, and because she had been his mother for nineteen years and did not need a man in Algiers to tell her to listen.
"Hey, Mama."
"Hey, baby. Y'all get fireworks?"
"They did some over the airfield. We watched from the barracks. It was good."
"Was it hot?"
"Yes ma'am. It's Georgia."
She wrote It's Georgia down. Not because it meant anything. Because it was his.
"How's the food."
"Fine."
That one wasn't.
She had known it wouldn't be, and she wrote it anyway, with the time. Fine. 6:12. Not his.