The Trumpets, Book 3
Wormwood
When the star fell burning into the Colorado watershed, Marisol Vega read it first on her own instruments.
When the star fell burning into the Colorado watershed, Marisol Vega read it first on her own instruments.
A third of the rivers turned bitter. The test strips in the Yuma water plant came up black in her hand, and the town began dying of its own taps. Marisol did everything right. She closed the intake, opened the reserves, reported the truth up the chain. The chain thanked her, and went quiet, and came back with an answer that had a price.
The Purification Program: clean water, free, through attested distribution points, for every household willing to take the face placement, a small ceremony, they say, a name set beneath the skin of your forehead. The lines form by the second day. Her neighbors take it. Her children's classmates take it. All she has to do to get her plant back, her town back, her life back, is certify the bitter water safe, and tip her own face up with the rest.
Marisol Vega will not sign.
What she finds instead is an old mission outside town, and a spring that has run sweet for a hundred years beside a river gone bitter, and an old keeper who tells her the only thing she needs to know about it: "It has never failed. It is not ours." She cannot purify the river. The judgment stands. But she can point a thirsty town to the water that was never hers to certify, and teach them what Marah taught Moses: the God of the bitter water makes it sweet in His time, and in His way.
Wormwood is the third book of The Trumpets, the explosive saga from Caden Noir, continuing the world of the Seven Lampstands. The trumpets are judgments, and judgments are real. But they are not the last word.