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.

To get their people back, the crew will bargain with gold, cross a drowned country beneath redwoods that were never logged, and find a city in the canopy that the maps of two worlds have never shown. Esah — who has never yet met a wall without a door — will learn what his strange, quiet fourth sense has been trying to tell him his whole life. And the price of every rescue comes due in the last place any of them thought to look: a truth that reaches out of the splinter world into the one they all left behind, rewriting what every death since the beginning has meant.

Adrift is Book 4 of the Splintered World series and is available in print and audiobook, performed by Luke Daniels — Audie Award winner with over 1,000 titles narrated, including The Three-Body Problem and the Iron Druid Chronicles.

The water is watching. It has been for years.