Nothing in this world is free. Pretending otherwise is what killed it.The Green Wall survived the end of the world. Two hundred people behind a ring of pine and oak too thick to see through, four hard years of ground they earned an inch at a time, and a gate nobody has ever forced.Then a bell rings out on the road.Colonel Amos Teague called livestock sales in Grimes County for forty years. He is polite. He is patient. He has never once been caught in a lie. He and his outfit, thirty men, trucks and dirt bikes, humming under his chant, take four people off the potato ground one cold morning, set them on a flatbed with numbered tags between their shoulders, and call the terms at the wire.He isn't raiding the settlement. He's selling it back its own people, in daylight, with a clerk writing every word down.The bell will ring again next week, and the week after. The bids will climb: corn, then medicine, then dignity, then names. And a lot the room will not carry does not walk away.Kel has held this place together since the day the lights went out. Now a reasonable man at his fence is asking him what two hundred people are worth, in a language that can't be argued with.Every lot has a reserve. The room never learns the number. The room only learns, at the end, whether it was reached.No Sale is a standalone grimdark novel set in the world of Golden Eyes in the Ruins*, filling the six years Book One leaves dark. New readers can start here.* Content Warning: This novel features mature themes, intense body horror, and unapologetic, gritty violence.
