The Unburied
Joel Gibbons grew up folding paper into order and reading the sky for somewhere bigger than his small Hobart home. He was raised on one kindness and one lie — that the father he never knew was dead. He left school to keep his mother afloat, and asked for nothing back. Then a passport form turned the dead man into a name, and Joel went looking. Now he breathes without a pulse in Clivilius, calls a stranger Dad, and folds what's left of himself into something that will hold.
Joel Gibbons was raised on love and a single lie: that the father he'd never met had died before he was born. He filled the silence with folded paper and star charts — order creased into shape, a sky wider than the home that held him. When his mother's health failed, he left school without a word and took a courier's wage, because that was what love cost. He asked for nothing. He never named the thing that was missing.
Then a form he filled out for a passport turned the dead man into a name. His father was alive. A lifetime of protection collapsed into a single betrayal, and Joel went looking — a search that led to a stranger's house, an impossible gate, and two men who took him for someone worth killing. A blade opened his throat on the driveway. He should have died there. In every way that counts, he did.
What answered instead was a voice, and a lagoon of cold light. Joel woke in Clivilius remade — breathing without a pulse, cold, moving when nothing in him should. The first word he spoke was Dad, to the father he'd crossed death to find. The kind of destiny he read about in paperbacks had arrived — and cost him his humanity. Now the boy who once folded order out of nothing must do it again with what remains, and some nights he cannot tell how much of himself the water gave back.
