Where the Sun Never Sets

Peace has a price, and someone always has to collect it.Centuries after the Unification Accords ended war, the World State governs a quiet Earth. Every citizen is graded Alpha through Epsilon. There is a Mother who provides, a Father who is blessed, and a Family for all who wish to belong.Eli Mercer is an Alpha-1. The State made him, schooled him, promoted him, and asks only one thing in return: that he keep the order running. He has never had cause to wonder what it costs - until two operations, one in a frozen mining town and one in a burning city, show him the counting up close.Then a colleague sets a folded square of paper on his desk: three lines her sister wrote about a honeybee, flagged as subversive by an evaluator who did not like the word broken. The sister has been detained. The poem is all that remains of her. A small thing. Also a question - and Eli was raised never to ask questions. He asks anyway, and it costs him his clearance, his designation, and every certainty he ever had. What it leads to is a choice he cannot take back: the bee, or the Father.Where the Sun Never Sets is the confession of a man who enforced an order before he understood it - a novel about arithmetic: how many lives a peace is worth, and who gets to do the counting.Book One of the Sun Series.