Kerosene Saints

The city is forty feet below the sea.

Ashmouth stays dry because eight buried engines pump it dry. Nobody alive knows who built them. Nobody knows what happens if one of them stops.

In 1938, Engine Four begins to fail.

A salvage diver brings up the wrong piece of brass from a drowned street and finds a name nobody will explain. A radio operator hears counting on a dead frequency and is told to stop listening. An airship captain is chartered to survey a stretch of open water where there is officially nothing to see. And in the poorest quarter in the city, a woman climbs a hundred and eleven feet down a ladder every week and puts her hands on something she is not permitted to describe.

None of them can save Ashmouth. All four of them are going to try anyway.

KEROSENE SAINTS is four interlocking novellas spanning forty years of one sinking city - a story about machinery, arithmetic, bureaucracy and nerve, and about the unglamorous people who hold a place together while everybody else sleeps.

• I. The Salt Line - a diver brings up a piece of brass that was never supposed to surface.
• II. The Ghost Frequency - a radio operator proves what the city refuses to hear.
• III. The Last Good Airship - a captain flies a survey nobody will put in writing.
• IV. Kerosene Saints - the woman on the ladder finds out what is actually down there.

Keep it turning.