Two novels by Manuel A. Dominguez
The Farbound Union
- 1 · DISSONANCE
- 2 · The Fourth Rail
The first chapter of DISSONANCE is free to read on this site. Read chapter 1
Book I · Neo New Orleans · 84 chapters
In the Mud of Neo New Orleans, every ward keeps time by its pump. On Sabine Row in Ward 7 the stroke runs forty a minute, and you can feel it through the floor. Above the wards sit the Canopy decks.
The Anvil is a big household on the corner of Palmer and Dauphine: a kitchen, a clinic and a workshop. Yvonne Celestin keeps the clinic lamp and the shrine. Marcel De La Rosa, nineteen, mends whatever the ward carries through the door and lives on a heart with a history of its own. Nox has come home after eleven years with the pockets of his jacket sewn shut.
Book II · The corridor · 96 chapters
“I am Ayida.” That is how the book begins. Ayida gathers what people tell her beside water, and since the Aftertone she can stay with a story long enough to hear the rest of it. She has no eyes. The first tellings reach her in Gotham, at the harbor steps, at a ward’s water riser, and in the tank of an old rail car.
It is the summer of 3004. Three Strongholds grew up along the corridor, Gotham, Liberty and Garden, each with its own language, and they are at war. In Gotham the lifts are failing in the heat and the war office is checking household registers floor by floor.