Aaron has spent his whole life keeping machines running in a sealed Hutterite colony buried under thirty years of fallout, until the...
A MARI USQUE AD MARE CYCLE II BOOK
Thirty years after the Light, Aaron’s Hutterite colony survives the only way it knows how: sealed underground, ruled by bells and prayer, trusting the Elders to keep the world’s poison on the other side of a steel door. Aaron keeps the machines running. That’s the whole of what he’s ever wanted to be.
Then the geese come back and they don’t migrate. They watch. They wait outside the vents at night, and when they call, it’s never in a goose’s voice. It’s a lost child. A dying man’s scream. Someone’s own name, spoken in the dark by something that has never once been seen clearly enough to name back.
Aaron builds a tool to answer them, and refuses to call it what it is. But when the fallout finally gets inside the colony’s own lungs, someone has to walk out into the country the Sirens own to bring back the one thing that can save it and Aaron is the only one who understands both machines well enough to fix what’s broken, and geese well enough to know exactly what’s hunting them.
Outside the door, the danger is at least honest. Inside it, a colony already turning on its refugees, its doubters, and eventually its own defenders finds a shepherd of a very different kind one who’d rather be feared for what he’s willing to build than trusted for what he’s willing to believe.
Iron Shepherds is a story about the thin, unstable line between protecting a flock and becoming its predator and about the men who get cast out for finding it: The Iron Shepherds.
