Somebody's Boy: World Haven Book 3

By D. Wayne Harbison

For thirty-one years, the European Entente has been dying on a continent it believes is empty.
A hundred and eleven thousand men, gone to a fever no physician can isolate - no organism, no transmission, no immunity, and a border so clean you could rule a line along it for two hundred miles and never once miss. The Empire calls it a hardship of climate. It has buried three generations calling it that.
It is not a fever. It is a fence. Behind it, a million people have kept a promise their ancestors wrote in blood: never again will we be seen. They have held the door shut for six hundred years - and they have just voted, by seven votes, in an open hall, with every name on the record, to open it.
Eight strangers with empty hands are the first through.
A sixty-four-year-old physicist who talks about physics to frightened young metahumans. A woman who can hold up a mountain, and who will tell you the exact number of minutes she has left before she has to let go. A half-Atlantean girl who reads water like a book. A young technopath who can hear a machine think. A century-old mage who has never once asked what he is. A European Entente intelligence officer who has never written down anything he didn't believe was true. A young werewolf who knows the surrounding forest is aware. And an eighteen-year-old boy who has spent four years being told he doesn't fit any file his government owns.
They are not an army. They are not an embassy. They are the last diplomatic option three continents have - and their own governments have already told them to expect failure.
What waits beyond the door is a civilization that solved the problem the rest of the world hasn't even named yet: what you build for the extraordinary people you keep producing. Their answer is six hundred years old, a million people wide, and it is not a school.
And the mountain above their oldest city is failing.
If you're tired of watching your heroes torn down, this is the other kind of book.
They are heroic and human at once, and the story never once mistakes cruelty for depth. Nobody in here turns out to be a monster - a physicist who sits on floors outside bathroom doors, a woman who spends four minutes recovering a dead brewery horse because a man asked her to, a mage who has never once asked what he is. The problem was never that they were dangerous. The problem is that nobody knew how to train their next generation.
No monsters does not mean nothing goes wrong.
A hundred and eleven thousand are already dead before page one. An empire is deciding whether to send a fleet. The tallest mountain on the world plate is coming apart above ten thousand people who have never once needed an evacuation plan. And a boy who has spent his whole life being unreadable is about to find out what he is, on a ledge, in front of a city.
A first-contact novel about the day the last hidden civilization in the world decides to open its gate - and the six strangers who walk through it.
For readers of Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish cycle, Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Becky Chambers's Wayfarers, Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor, and Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow - and for anyone who grew up on X-Men and has been waiting for a book that takes the school question seriously.
Somebody's Boy is the third book in the World Haven sequence and stands alone. Start here if you like.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HK6N3NY9
• ISBN13: 9798175206549
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 580 Pages
• Weight: 1.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"