Vessel

A cultish theocracy.

Demand for purity.

Forbidden love.

Paige has been training her whole life to become a human sacrifice.

For seventeen years, she's been the picture of purity in her small religious community, atoning for her aunt's love affair with another woman. Paige is nothing like her aunt. Paige is a good daughter. She's a true believer. She loves her town and wants to use her purity to serve as the Ritualist, the savior of her oldest neighbors she guides them into the afterlife.

Because if she doesn't, she'll spend the rest of her life married to a boy, still pining for the girl she's been in love with for years - her best friend, Mott. And Paige just can't live like that.

So she performs her Ritualist duties amid growing rumors of heretics. She represses her desire, knowing that only radical obedience can maintain the increasingly fragile peace around her. But when Mott and Paige's brother get themselves arrested, Paige faces an impossible choice: deny herself and be the perfect sacrifice her community needs, or run away from her idyllic community to the wastelands outside - to certain death.

That is, if her community doesn't kill her first.