Low Water - Ambrose Gray

Year 12 of the Recession. The sea stands fifty-five meters below the old waterline, and it is still leaving. Two years after a small, deniable test proved that feeding the sea worked, the tribute has gone public: the Vestra Combine drowns the unclaimed in barges at its Reclamation Fields on the outer Shelf, and the whole Foreshore is voting on whether to make it law.

Sena Voss is hired to chart Field Nine, the newest field: twenty-two days of sounding work on a graveyard that is still being filled. But the manifests do not balance, the barges run at night, and Tommie charts keep finding the same impossible thing. The bodies going down into the fields are not unclaimed at all.

As referendum day tears the Foreshore apart, prophets and tide-readers, Vestra lobbyists, the families of the missing, Sena has to decide how far she will go to prove what she has mapped, and what a chart is worth when no one wants to read it.

The eleven will be named and remembered. The water is still leaving. And the math works, which is the most monstrous thing about it.