Meter Red

In Cardon Dome, the numbers are always honest. It's the inputs nobody checks.

Adeline Marsh has spent six years reading meters instead of faces, patient enough to catch a scrubber lying to itself over eleven straight days. It's the only skill the dome ever rewarded in her: being unremarkable enough that nobody watched what she found.

Then she finds a document that isn't supposed to print for six more weeks, and her own name is on it, attached to a draw figure nineteen points higher than the one she's logged with her own hands. The Office won't execute her for it. It will just stop counting her as someone entitled to breathe.

The only way to prove the number is a lie is to walk into the one room in the Strata built to kill anyone who enters it without permission, using the same true arithmetic that already erased someone she loved once.

She has forty-two days, a mentor who's steering her somewhere he won't name, and a Terrace engineer who reads a gauge the way she does and is keeping just as many secrets.

Adeline has never falsified a number in her life. She's about to find out if honesty survives a room built to kill her for entering it.

Meter Red is Book One of The Air Ledger, an adult survival dystopian trilogy for fans of Silo and Red Rising.