No Sale

Nothing in this world is free. Pretending otherwise is what killed it. The Green Wall survived the end of the world. Two hundred people behind a ring of pine and oak too thick to see through, four hard years of ground they earned an inch at a time, and a gate nobody has ever forced.Then a bell rings out on the road. Colonel Amos Teague called livestock sales in Grimes County for forty years. He is polite. He is patient. He has never once been caught in a lie. He and his outfit, thirty men, trucks and dirt bikes, humming under his chant, take four people off the potato ground one cold morning, set them on a flatbed with numbered tags between their shoulders, and call the terms at the wire.He isn't raiding the settlement. He's selling it back its own people, in daylight, with a clerk writing every word down.The bell will ring again next week, and the week after. The bids will climb: corn, then medicine, then dignity, then names. And a lot the room will not carry does not walk away.Kel has held this place together since the day the lights went out. Now a reasonable man at his fence is asking him what two hundred people are worth, in a language that can't be argued with.Every lot has a reserve. The room never learns the number. The room only learns, at the end, whether it was reached.No Sale is a standalone grimdark novel set in the world of Golden Eyes in the Ruins*, filling the six years Book One leaves dark. New readers can start here.* Content Warning: This novel features mature themes, intense body horror, and unapologetic, gritty violence.