A dock checker and his daughter come ashore having lived years the station didn't. The records moved on without them: an estate distributed, a status lapsed, a death certified by an ordinary process nobody performed in bad faith, and a treatment the girl needs that can't wait for the next sailing. Whichever way the administration rules, it takes something irreversible from someone with a good claim. And there's nobody to appeal to, because the founders costed a review board and cut it.
This one's about what a place owes the people who arrive at it, and it has no villain.
- Amazon (Kindle, free on Kindle Unlimited, and paperback)
- Read the opening and see every other store: https://fracturedcosmology.xyz/books/who-gets-to-answer/
- Free audiobook on YouTube: Part 1 · Part 2
- No villain. Did that work for you, or did you want someone to be wrong?
- The twelve-year-old born in transit, whose status gets settled by whatever the case produces. Was she the real subject?
- The election nobody planned. Did it feel like politics, in the good sense?
Spoilers for this book are fine below. It's the book's own thread. Anything from a later book or another series, wrap it in [spoiler] tags so nobody gets ambushed.