The Wrong Down

Down is moving.

Maya Stern is nineteen, a Caltech engineering student, and the first person in Los Angeles to notice a ball bearing rolling the wrong way.

By nightfall, down is moving. A subway train leans into the tunnel wall. Water climbs the steps of a motel pool. In a children’s hospital, a nurse counts which beds the floor can still hold.

Beneath the city lies a machine older than the human species. It has moved the Earth out of harm’s way before, and it is waking again because something is coming. Its idea of saving the planet doesn’t include the people living on it.

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