The Seeding Ground

Orson Pryce has always trusted numbers. He calculated the eclipse down to the second — ninety-four seconds of totality, four hundred and eleven miles from home, every variable accounted for. What he didn't calculate was the boy. Nine years old, filthy, gnawing on a human finger like it was nothing at all. By the time Orson follows him off the marked trail, his phone is dead, his water is gone, and the singing rising up from underground sounds less like a hallucination and more like an invitation. At the bottom of a two-hundred-foot sinkhole in the Utah badlands, a woman named Mabyn offers him a bowl of stew and a place to sleep. He should have asked why the ladder gets pulled up at night. What follows isn't a rescue story. It's an inventory — of bone, of blood, of a wall in the back of a stone shack where a woman marks the months in her own hand, counting toward something Orson doesn't understand until it's far too late to matter. The canyon has a use for him. It has had a use for men like him longer than anyone still living can say. And up on the rim, a boy with a bone in his mouth is already watching for the next one. The Seeding Ground is a novel about what's left of a man once every reason to stay human has been stripped away — and about the quiet, patient logic of a family that has convinced itself none of this is cruelty. It's stewardship. It's owed. The earth takes the seed. The shell stays below.