The Sentinel Veil

Mars is running out of air. The officials say everything is fine. A twelve-year-old girl has found the numbers that prove otherwise.

Concord was built so that no one would ever need an army. It has thirty-one days to form one.

Nadia Turner-Singh doesn't mean to find the leak. A school assignment, a number that won't add up, and the awful discovery that Mars's long climb toward breathable air has quietly gone into reverse, while the official reports still say all is well.

Governor Bailey has known for years. And he has a fix: an ancient, dangerous piece of Martian engineering that could restart the planet's dead magnetic field and save everything. But he wants to build it his way, on his own authority, powered by the very reactors that keep Concord's cities breathing and its hospitals running.

The price is Concord's freedom. And Bailey is not a man who asks twice.

When his ultimatum arrives, Concord has no way to say yes, or even no. What follows is a war like no other on Mars: a war fought with reactors instead of rifles, with a shield of light and lattice instead of steel, and with a clock that is also the planet's air. Nadia, her grandparents Emily and Richard, and a courageous android named Wren, who is asked what he truly wants to become, must decide how much of what three generations built they are willing to risk to protect it.

And in the shadows, ambitious people with ledgers and favours are quietly making sure that when the crisis comes, someone will be ready to profit from it.

THE SENTINEL VEIL is the thrilling third book in The Great Mars Migration, a family saga that began with one discovery deep inside Mars, and led to a chain of breakthroughs that let a colony thrive as never before. Grounded in real science and written in the tradition of classic science fiction, it is a story about courage, sacrifice, and what a people will pay for the freedom to decide their own future.

When the air runs out, who decides who breathes?

Book Three of The Great Mars Migration. Best enjoyed after Books One and Two. Scroll up and grab your copy now.