Saint Machine: The Waking: A Comic Science-Fantasy Novel

Gods were built, not born — and the ones we built are dying.

A dying god can be woken gently: with consent, in its own time, at the cost of a clean and final goodbye. Laura did it once, for her own hometown, and proved it could be done right. She also proved it could be done at all — and now the permission has raced across a thawing world without the wisdom to match it. Desperate towns are tearing their gods awake by force, and a god woken wrong doesn’t bless. It leaves its people hollow and walking, its door cracked, and something vast and patient leaking through from the far side of the cold.

Laura knows the right way. What she learns, town by ruined town, is harder than any method: that being right about the kind thing and having the right to choose it for someone else are not the same. At her side is her younger brother, whose gift for feeling the dying gods is the only map she has — and the thing she can’t stop spending to find them. And the keeper she’s hunting, the one teaching the world to force the doors open, is no monster. She is everything Laura might have become on one worse day, and she cannot be argued with, because she is not wrong.

By turns laugh-out-loud funny and quietly devastating, The Waking is a story about grief, consent, and the unbearable arithmetic of rescue — and about the long dark the gods were built to hold back, which has only just begun, for the first time, to notice it’s being watched.

Book Two of the Saint Machine trilogy.