Light the Dark

They said she would be provided for. Nobody said she'd be given back.

A clean Christian EMP survival thriller. No profanity, no sexual content. Contains realistic survival violence.

Nine-year-old Ivy Harlow is in a warm ward under a limestone mountain, with a pencil behind her ear and sixty other children whose parents can be made to report for work in the morning. The Ozark Regional Recovery Authority has her insulin, her number and her name on a list. It has nailed a summons to her parents' door that says their daughter will be provided for.

Wade and Lainey don't report. They can't storm a mountain, and they can't hide on a ridge while the valley pays for them. So the lineman who walked home and ran north does the one thing he was never allowed to do for his own town: he builds it a light. An old mill dam, a seized turbine, a farm motor run backward, and a cold room that keeps insulin without anyone's permission, before the last good vials go bad on the tenth of December.

Then the light draws the men who need to own it. A polite colonel who never forgets a name. A warm-voiced Administrator with a flag pin and a plywood switch. A deputy with a cane and a grudge. And an ice storm, a burned church, a retired schoolteacher on forty meters, and a mountain with one more ceremony planned for Christmas Eve.

Lainey counts what she has. She has done it every day since the pulse. This time she counts something else.

Inside you'll find:

• A hydro build against a deadline: a century-old turbine, a feed-mill motor, pole-top capacitors, and a car battery to wake the iron
• A lineman's rule, treat every line as hot, turned into a plan, a door and one very steady flashlight
• A valley that signs its own names in its own hand against a county registry
• A villain who feeds a hungry town and asks no names, and a colonel who finally checks
• A ham radio, a schoolteacher, and a fifteen-year-old who learns to ask for the password
• Faith told honestly: Advent candles, a church in ashes, a confession, and a prayer that comes back half a sentence at a time
• Christmas Eve: sixty-one children, sixty-one small lights, and nineteen pillars in the dark

Light the Dark is Book 3, the final book of the Lines Down series, about 72,000 words, and it picks up where Run the Dark ends. Start with Walk the Dark. For readers of One Second After and Terri Blackstock's Last Light.