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Old Broken Things
The world does not know how close it came. James Hather knows. He was there — and when it was over, he went home.
A closed-up house in eastern Pennsylvania. His father's caliper on the desk, a seized lawnmower in the garage, and his great-aunt's 1920s radio standing under a bedsheet, where it has stood for thirty years. His father wanted him to get it working. He never did.
The trouble is what the year out there left in him. His hands do not hurt any more. He wakes at three in the morning in a kitchen that is somehow adjacent to every kitchen he has ever stood in. And his gut — forty years of knowing what is wrong with a machine before he can say why — has stopped having a ceiling.
So he starts small. A wall. A bathroom fan. A ground rod under the hydrangea. Ninety-one things quietly wrong with his own house, and he is right about every one of them. Then the survey widens — to practices kept for generations by people who cannot say why, and are correct. Three traditions. Three continents. No contact between them, ever. The same precaution.
Somebody worked this world before us. They left something running. It has been failing, alone and unattended, for longer than our species has existed.
And it has just filed a work order.
The first five books complete the opening arc of The Saucer Series. Old Broken Things follows what James did Book Six, opening on the last morning of The Verdict. His story continues in The Ones Still Standing.
A closed-up house in eastern Pennsylvania. His father's caliper on the desk, a seized lawnmower in the garage, and his great-aunt's 1920s radio standing under a bedsheet, where it has stood for thirty years. His father wanted him to get it working. He never did.
The trouble is what the year out there left in him. His hands do not hurt any more. He wakes at three in the morning in a kitchen that is somehow adjacent to every kitchen he has ever stood in. And his gut — forty years of knowing what is wrong with a machine before he can say why — has stopped having a ceiling.
So he starts small. A wall. A bathroom fan. A ground rod under the hydrangea. Ninety-one things quietly wrong with his own house, and he is right about every one of them. Then the survey widens — to practices kept for generations by people who cannot say why, and are correct. Three traditions. Three continents. No contact between them, ever. The same precaution.
Somebody worked this world before us. They left something running. It has been failing, alone and unattended, for longer than our species has existed.
And it has just filed a work order.
The first five books complete the opening arc of The Saucer Series. Old Broken Things follows what James did Book Six, opening on the last morning of The Verdict. His story continues in The Ones Still Standing.
253 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 12, 2026
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