Strata

"You're misremembering."

Samuel Cole has been told it his whole life - by his parents, by his doctors, by his sister - every time he tries to describe the neighbor who taught him to see. A man no one else on earth remembers.

He is a geologist now. He reads the earth in layers and stakes his name on what it tells him. Stone does not lie to him. He cannot say the same of himself.

The world is a record, and something very far ahead of us is editing it - unmaking the people who threaten what is coming, so completely that no one who is left could miss them. A few can still feel the hole. And the record's oldest defense is not secrecy. It is the habit it has taught every witness: to disbelieve your own eyes.

Samuel stops disbelieving. And the moment he looks straight at it, he finds the rule beneath everything: the record erases what it notices - and nothing makes a person more noticeable than being loved.

Which puts Hannah on the list. His sister is marked for nothing she has done. Only for being loved by him.

To reach her, Samuel will have to go down - through a society that has served the editors for millennia and a resistance that has fought them for three centuries; from a labyrinth beneath the pyramids at Giza to a chamber in the Andes, each layer older than the one above it, until he reaches the seam beneath them all and finds something that was here first.

And he will have to face the one thing he has never questioned: that he protects the people he loves by controlling what they are allowed to see.

Which is precisely what the record does.

Which is what he has been doing to Hannah since they were children.