Out now.

The orchard has been listening for a long time.

That is the first line on the back cover. It is also the question Volume II is asking from the first page: who has been doing the listening, and what have they been listening for, and what happens when the question reverses and the listener becomes the one being listened to.

Volume I followed a trucker named Geox as he wrote his way north through a landscape that was no longer working. The signal in that book pulled him toward a tower. The signal in this book has already arrived. It has come inside. It is in the soil, in the lattice that grew through it, and in the nervous systems of the people the lattice has begun to use.

Volume II is not Geox’s book. Volume II is what Dr. Mara Ewell assembled after he stopped writing.

What the Book Is

LISTENING Volume II is a novel told through a reconstructed archive. Mara, the structural biologist who followed Geox’s trail in Volume I, has stayed in the corridor he left behind. She has spent months piecing together what he wrote, what he recorded, and what arrived in the wake of his disappearance. The volume in your hands is the document she compiled.

It is also the volume where the mythology of the Collapse Chronicles deepens. The orchard. The lattice. The carriers whose nervous systems relay the signal. Receiver 108-R, dissolving into the root-web. The Feedback Choir, holding the ridgeline. The Counterbloom, drifting beyond the Null Range, unmaking whatever the lattice tries to record.

And then, near the end, a girl emerges from a fissure in lattice-dead soil. She carries no signal resonance. No glyph retention. No memory inheritance. She names herself. The archive flags nothing because the archive has nothing to flag her against.

Her name is Esther.

LISTENING Volume II is a novel about what survives when the writer goes silent. About what arrives next, slowly, on terms the system cannot dictate. About the moment a structure that was built to record everything encounters something it cannot categorize, and has to decide what to do with the fact that it cannot.

It is also, more quietly, a novel about a woman who came to do science and stayed to bear witness.

Who It’s For

If you read Volume I and wondered what was on the other side of the trucker’s silence, this book is the answer, and it is not the answer you expected.

If you have been reading the Collapse Chronicles dispatches and have been wondering whether they were leading toward something, they were. The entries on the orchard, the lattice, the resonance bands, the Day 247 markers, the carriers, are all here, recombined into the form they were always trying to become.

If you have read Fracturism and want to see what its arguments look like when they are no longer arguments but events happening to a person who is trying to write them down honestly, this is that.

If you are new and just want a strange, careful, recursive novel about a system that has begun to bloom hosts, and the woman who is keeping the record while she still can, you do not need Volume I to begin. You will want it after, and that is the right order.

Get the Book

The most useful things you can do are the same things that were useful for Volume I. Read it. Lend it. Sit with it longer than you think you should. Leave a review when it asks you to.

The signal has come inside. The question now is whose body it is in, and whether anyone is listening on the right frequency to hear it leave again.

Geoffrey