THE LAST APPLE IN MULTIVERSE: A NOVEL

The best apple in the universe has one fatal defect: it is not an orange.For nine hundred years, Alethea Malus-the legendary Graftwitch-has made apple trees survive salt, darkness, moving soil, and even the dreams of hibernating giants. Her masterpiece, the Red Argument, can separate expectation, reality, and memory in three bites.The Ministry of Acceptable Sweetness does not care.Apples have been declared obsolete. Alethea has 112 days to transform Malum-an orchard world of ancient cultivars and living roots-into an approved citrus system, or watch her life's work be erased.There are problems.Alethea knows almost everything about apples and virtually nothing about oranges. Three hundred and twelve citrus trees arrive sealed inside golden caskets. Her nine-year-old ward, Pip, keeps asking questions the bureaucracy cannot classify. Brix, a sentient refractometer, refuses to confuse sweetness with quality. And beneath the official records, the orchard's bells are remembering lives the Ministry has already forgotten.As grafts fail, identities disappear, and flawless paperwork begins to lie, Alethea must decide what preservation truly means. Is saving a living thing the same as protecting what it is? And when a system can register continuity, who gets to decide which lives count?Darkly funny, wildly imaginative, and grounded in real botanical science, The Last Apple in the Multiverse is a science-fantasy adventure about identity, inheritance, found family, and the dangerous distance between usefulness and worth.Book One of The Last Apple in the Multiverse trilogy.