The Coherence Rupture

John Weber kept his promise. Maybe he shouldn't have.

The door is open now - his manual spreading into the hands of the curious or desperate - and John and Ella are running through the registers beneath the world, hunted by an authority that wants them quietly unmade. Ella is coming apart one word at a time, and John, who has never met a broken thing he couldn't fix, refuses to accept that she is the exception.

There is a rumor of help on the road to the bottom of the world. Something that might hold together a consciousness leaking out of its container. To reach it they'll need a guide through the black markets of the lower layers - a forgettable man who knows the roads, and who is very clear that there is no altruism anywhere in the arrangement.
He's telling the truth. That's the one thing John doesn't believe.

Because everything down here is a transaction. Every road has a toll. Every mercy has a buyer. And the cure John is chasing for the woman he's bound to is bait on a hook that was baited a very long time ago - by something patient, and pleasant, and already waiting at the bottom of the throat with a warm smile and a place set for two.

The Exchange is the second book of The Coherence Rupture, a six-book descent into a cosmos that runs on the quiet trade of consciousness - where the horror isn't malice, but arithmetic, and the most dangerous words anyone can offer you are I'm here to help.