Between the Rain Drops - Marcus Garvin

They saw it first in the data, which was where things like this were always going to be seen first - not in the sky, not in the news, not in anything the public would recognize, but in a quiet archive at a station where one person was paying closer attention than the archive had been built to reward.

By the time the world understood, it had been seven years.

By the time the world decided what to do, it had been twelve.

By the time the answer was ready to be built, the people who had been building toward it for most of their adult lives had stopped asking whether it would work and started asking what kind of thing they wanted humanity to become on the other side of what was coming.

Between the Rain Drops is a novel about the slow arithmetic of institutional response, about the quiet rooms where civilizational decisions are actually made, about grief held across a timescale most grief is not asked to survive, and about what a handful of people choose to carry forward when the arithmetic stops closing and the window starts narrowing and the only honest thing left to say is that the chance is real.

A real one.