The Sickness

The Sickness Tides of Tomorrow Book One by August Mae

Fifty years after the seas rose, the Estuary Collective has built a life worth living. Floating platforms connected by rope bridges. Vertical gardens and kelp forests. A community sustained by the tides and by each other.

Then the coughing starts.

The illness spreads faster than fear. The healers' herbs cannot touch it. And when the death toll rises, the Collective faces an impossible choice: wait and hope, or send a foraging party into the unknown.

Their destination: Old Bristol. A drowned city where only the tallest towers break the surface. Rumour says people survived there, people who might have kept the old medical knowledge alive.

Four volunteers step forward. An engineer who has never left home. An apprentice healer carrying everyone's hopes. An old sailor returning to the city he fled fifty years ago. And a scout with secrets of her own.

Two days across waters no one has charted. A city no one has seen. Strangers who may help them or turn them away.

The Collective is dying.

The cure lies beyond the horizon.

The Sickness is the first novella in Tides of Tomorrow, a hopeful climate fiction series for readers who love Becky Chambers, Station Eleven, and City of Ember.