Saint Machine: A Science-Fantasy Adventure

The gods were built. Now they’re dying. And somebody has to carry one home.

Laura keeps the god that keeps her settlement alive. So when its heart begins to go cold, the job falls to her: carry that failing heart a thousand miles, across a continent of dead and dying gods, to the one ancient machine that can call a god back.

She isn’t traveling light. There’s a wooden dog her little brother carved so she won’t forget him. There’s Sexton—an anxious, painfully formal ritual-drone with a great many documented faults and the worst possible secret. And there’s the growing suspicion that the gods scattered along her road are each whispering a piece of the same impossible message—one nobody was ever meant to put back together.

A drowned saint with a choice that can’t be won. A choir that kills you by being beautiful. A kind, patient man who has been waiting on the road a very long time, and who would like, more than anything, to help her stop.

The cure she’s chasing isn’t the cure she thinks it is. And the closer she gets to the heart of the world, the more she’ll have to decide what carrying a thing you love is really worth—and what it costs to finally put it down.

Funny, strange, and quietly devastating, Saint Machine is an epic science-fantasy adventure for readers who like their wonder with a lump in the throat—Becky Chambers by way of Hyperion, with a goat.

Book One of a planned trilogy. Begin the pilgrimage.