novella · Science fiction
The Overcount
On a sealed generation ship that licenses one birth for every death, a young officer of the population count strikes a name and finds the ship still breathing for one more body than the register can name — a person born to the voyage and never entered, alive her whole life in the unmapped decks.
1 of 11 chapters written
Content note: A taut, present-tense generation-ship thriller with a warm center. A gentle death (attended, off-page), a hidden person hunted, and the quiet menace of a system that erases what it cannot count — dark but not adult-only, gripping before it is sad. No gore, nothing explicit.
A novella of the Long Quiet, and a new tale in the realm of The Cartographer of Decks — it reads completely on its own. Wren Astel is a teller of the Muster, the office that keeps the Ark Meridian balanced to the body: one aboard for every one the ship can bear, a birth licensed only against a death. She strikes a beloved name from the register, runs the reconciliation that has never once failed — and the ship’s honest breath comes back high by one. Someone has been aboard her whole life who was never licensed to draw a single mouthful of this air. Everything she was taught says an unlicensed body is a leak in a sealed world. Then she has to go and find the face at the end of the column.
First person, present tense; taut and procedural, warmth held under. Eleven chapters. The whole plan — the hidden life, the choice, and the ending — is in the blueprint.
Chapters
- 1 The Quittance
- …10 more chapters planned