No Saints

Saint Atlas came home to die. He did something worse.

He fell out of a clear morning sky over Manhattan on an ordinary Tuesday, with no fire behind him and no enemy chasing him. A boy on a school roof laughed, because the greatest hero alive sometimes staged a rescue for the cameras. Then Saint Atlas hit concrete like meat. He did not crater the roof. The seam in his chest opened on its own, and every person he had ever saved began to feel it.

Old wounds reopen. Healed bones snap back into breaks. A soldier's bullet wound bursts through his thigh twelve years after it closed. A cameraman's childhood fracture cracks open inside his arm. The thing wearing the world's greatest hero still wants to rescue people, and rescue is how it spreads. Every miracle it performs leaves a door standing open behind it.

Vera Cross is the one person it cannot touch. Her body refuses miracles. It always has. That defect made her strange in a world that knelt for saints, and it is the reason she is the only living thing that can walk into a sealed city carrying a crowbar and a short list of things she will not do.

Her brother crossed the barricade at 11:52 this morning. Caleb owed Saint Atlas his life and treated that debt like religion. He is somewhere under the Federal Building, and the god down there is growing organs to understand him. A heart ward that begs. A choir made of throats. An archive holding everyone Atlas ever rescued, awake and grateful and filed like paper, waiting for a visitor. When Vera finally reaches them, thousands of saved voices speak as one and tell her they are glad someone came to read them.

Deeper still, under the archive, the unsaved are learning to move. The people he never reached. The ones who burned in the wrong building on the wrong night, who made only absence, who kept no records at all. They have been counting.

It speaks in Caleb's voice. It offers to make the dead useful. It shows her a version of the night she failed, the one where everybody gets up and forgives her, and it makes the offer kindly. That is the worst part. Nothing under Manhattan is cruel. It only wants to help, and it has all the time and all the bodies it needs to learn how.

Aboveground the danger wears a cleaner face. The government wants containment. A defense contractor wants a product he can sell to armies. The crowds outside the barricades want a new saint, and they have started chanting Vera's name. A woman with a red seam in her chest screams that the Unhealed murdered her children's miracle. Somebody scratches a rule onto a wall, a small and decent one, and by morning a hundred thousand people are repeating it wrong.

Vera has seen what worship does to a good idea. To reach her brother she has to go down through every organ of a dying god that will not stop trying to help her. To save anyone at all after that, she has to hand a terrified world one honest thing to hold, and make sure it never grows into a church.

NO SAINTS is a standalone superhero body-horror novel about the cost of being rescued.

• A superpowered apocalypse told at street level, hour by hour, inside a containment zone
• Body horror built from reopened scars, grown anatomy, and mercy that asks permission first
• A woman immune to the miracle, hated for it by the people she is trying to keep alive
• Faith, triage, and the slow horror of watching a rule turn into a religion
• A full-length novel of 144,000 words. No cliffhanger. One complete book.

There is no trusted miracle. Some wounds hold still. Holding still is not healing.

The city is sealed. The god downstairs is still trying to save everyone.

Contains graphic body horror, medical violence, and sustained dread. Read it with the lights on.