What We Sow
The year is 2089. Forty-two years after every animal on Earth vanished in a single catastrophic extinction, humanity solved its protein crisis the only way it could: by breeding itself.
Caleb Mast has never thought of himself as a bad man.
He pays his taxes. He maintains his equipment. He meets his quarterly targets. For four generations, the Mast family has operated a human breeding facility in southeastern Iowa, and Caleb has inherited it the way people inherit debt and land and the language of their fathers, as the only world he has ever known. The facility is not what he does. It is what he is.
Then the dying starts.
Stock falling in clusters. Patterns the monitoring systems cannot explain. When a corporate compliance directive forces Caleb to live on-site to contain the crisis, the daily distance he has relied upon to keep his world intact disappears. And in that enforced proximity, sleeping in his grandfather's quarters, walking the facility's corridors at hours he would never normally be present, he begins to see what that distance was protecting him from.
The deaths are not a plague. They are a choice. A coordinated, deliberate, collective choice made by people who have built something extraordinary inside the walls designed to prevent it: a language. A history. A culture. An argument, made through the only means available, that they are real and that being real means something.
When the corporation that owns his contract delivers an ultimatum, exterminate the current population and restock with genetically suppressed replacements, or lose his citizenship and become what he has spent his life tending, Caleb has forty-five days to answer a question that has been waiting in his family for four generations.
He just never expected to be the one it finally reached.
What We Sow is a novel about inherited complicity and the cost of finally seeing. It is about the people who maintain atrocity not through cruelty but through the daily, ordinary labor of not looking. And it is about what happens when the looking becomes unavoidable, when the question your grandfather never asked, and your father asked too late, arrives at your door with a face and a name and forty-five days on the clock.
This is not a story about monsters. It is a story about the people who run the facility, love their fathers, repair the porch railing on Saturdays, and have always told themselves that the work is simply the work.
Book Three of the After Eden Trilogy. Each novel stands alone. Together, they complete the picture.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks® and the ThriftBooks® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
