Freeboard

The Marrowdyke Level, Book Two

von Abir M

194 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Alma Setchell found the fault, reported it correctly, and had it put right.

Nineteen months on, the correction is best practice across forty parishes, the last pumping station that was quietly holding its water level has been automated, and she has taken a job inside the institution rolling it out. She took it for one reason: to be where the decisions are.

Being inside is worse. She signs the approvals herself now, twenty-six of them in eleven minutes on a Thursday afternoon.

So she goes looking for something else, and she finds it on a Sunday in January on four hundred metres of undisturbed flood bank at Sythe Corner. The register says the crest stands at 4.62 metres. She shoots it eleven times and gets 3.91.

The bank has not failed. There is no slip, no scar, no crack. The ground beneath it has been sinking since before the survey was taken, and the bank has gone down with it, intact, level, unbroken - and nobody has ever re-measured it, because there is no rule anywhere in England requiring anyone to re-measure a bank that has not fallen down.

Every crest level in the Level is wrong in the same direction. Every flood model is built on them. And the freeboard - the margin between the design water level and the top of the bank, the allowance for everything the model does not know - has been quietly spent.

She writes it up. Everybody agrees with her, promptly, on the merits, in writing. It goes into a programme for 2028.

Then it starts raining, and it does not stop for eleven weeks.

FREEBOARD is a horror novel about institutions: about the difference between being right and being able to act, about what a system does with a problem that has not happened yet, and about the particular dread of holding the evidence and the authority and still not having the thing you need.

Book Two of three. The story concludes in WASHLAND.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798174206694
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 14.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published