The Dearth

At 3:14 one morning in 2031, a fifth of the world's digital dollars moves nine hundred miles east. Nobody asked it to.

The money is Dolly, America's digital dollar. A mathematical proof of its reserves publishes itself every few minutes, open to anyone. Treasury has called the bank run obsolete. Over one August weekend, the peg breaks anyway. The money runs, and the world settles on a culprit. China did it.

Amos Reed once covered the place where money meets machines for the Wall Street Journal. Then he trusted his best source on a warning with no date attached. The story was true. It was also early, and the correction cost him his name. Now he keeps nine hives on a rented half-acre outside Rochester, Minnesota. He writes a newspaper column and a beekeeping blog a few hundred patient people read.

That source was Marcus Hale, the economist who designed Dolly. In October he drives up Amos's gravel road. He has done everything right this time. He put his warning in writing and took it to the Inspector General. It went into a drawer, because it threatens the administration's biggest win.

To follow what Marcus knows, Amos has to work against the story a frightened country has chosen. He has to trust the man who cost him his career. And he has to risk becoming, one more time, the reporter who says the true thing too early.

Told in Amos's voice and through the reports, testimony, and logs he gathers, THE DEARTH is a near-future techno-thriller about a catastrophe that was never hidden. Every clue was published. Nobody was looking at that page.

Beekeepers have a word for the late-summer stretch when the flowers quit. The dearth. It is not the disaster. It is the condition.