What Holds Us
August Vane
Type: Beta project
Genre: Science fiction, literary, contemporary, upmarket
Word count: 106,000
Warnings: Swearing
Detroit, the near future. The company remaking the city has a name for everything — the buses, the clinics, the line between the saved and the rest. Marek grows up on the wrong side of it, reading people the way his father once read engines. June grows up seeing how things work. The company has a use for both.
What's this?
Detroit, 2024 to 2037. Meliora Systems is buying the work of keeping a city alive — the buses, the clinics, the wages — and drawing a bright line between the people it saves and the people it doesn't.
Two children grow up on the far side of that line. Marek reads a room the way his father read an engine, before the machines took the trade and then the man. June keeps a notebook of questions and sees the workings of things too clearly to stop. When they find each other, each becomes the one person the other cannot lie to.
Which matters, because the lies are coming. The tower offers June a place inside it. It offers Marek a wage — to help tear his own streets down.
A novel about two people holding on to each other inside a machine built to outlast them.
August Vane grew up in Germany's motor country, in towns built around the making of cars, and has spent his career leading finance for the companies that run everyday life — groceries, payments, the quiet infrastructure people live inside. He learned to tell stories in a corporate culture that argues its decisions in written narrative rather than slides. A longtime student of America's underdog cities — the ones that fell and rose again on the backs of working people — he began writing about Detroit as the machines came for everyone's work. What Holds Us is his first novel. He lives in Bavaria.
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