Adrift

The description below assumes you've read Books 1 through 3. If you haven't, it will spoil Tethered's ending.

A thousand miles of sky. Six people, one raven, and a promise thirteen years overdue.

The airship Adrift rises from Delaney Rim carrying the Unbound west, across the bones of a world that never built its highways — over salt flats no one has crossed, through passes that kill the unwary, past settlements where nobody has heard of the basin, its wars, or its freedoms. The mission is simple to say and harder to survive: find the sixteen people the Authority's founders abandoned in Palo Alto, and carry word home.

What they find instead is absence.

The peninsula is pristine, prosperous, and empty. The few survivors huddle on hilltops and speak carefully about water that notices. Because in California the rivers are awake. Something vast and patient has spent thirteen years gathering everyone with a capability worth studying, and it does not let go. Anyone who approaches flowing water vanishes. Boats that enter the bay never return. And when the Adrift dares the Golden Gate, the fog itself rises to meet them.

The water is watching. It has been for years.

Performed by Luke Daniels — Audie Award winner with over 1,000 titles narrated, including The Three-Body Problem and the Iron Druid Chronicles.