A Fiendish Publishing Co.
The Catalog / No. 003
No. 003 · Novel · Systems thriller
He doesn't schedule deaths. He starts clocks.
Chance can repeat. Chance doesn't keep appointments.
The Book
At 2:17 on a Thursday morning, a man dies on a Chicago freight terminal, in the dark stretch between where a temporary floodlight ends and an equipment route begins. Every sheet that put him there is signed. Every sheet is correct.
Kayla is a trainee loss-control engineer at a Chicago insurer. She reads incident files from industries that never read each other's and writes down whether the operation matched the paper. That morning, it did. That afternoon, in a file from a Wisconsin dam, she reads the same sentence at the bottom of a different death: all parties acted in compliance.
Her father worshipped correct operation and died believing in a pattern no one else could see. He was born in Chicago and left it as a child. She left New Mexico, where he died, and came back to the city he left, to stop seeing patterns. Now there are two names in a column she doesn't remember starting, in handwriting that looks too much like his.
So she tries to break her own idea. It won't break. Then a grieving stranger writes to her. He has lost someone to the same shape, and he has the data to prove it isn't in her head. For the first time, she isn't alone with it.
A complaint filed on time. A maintenance window approved. An alarm tagged out for calibration. A risk acceptance signed by the one person who won't survive it. Every element is legal in isolation. The killer is never present, touches nothing, breaks nothing.
Interleaved countdown chapters show the reader what Kayla can't yet see. To us, they read like plans. To her, they arrive as accidents.
When she finally sees one coming, she does everything right. So does everyone else. Being right is about to make her a suspect.
He tracks forms. She tracks names. He has never broken a rule. To stop him, she'll have to break one, and sign her name to it.
The People
Trainee loss-control engineer
Surveys conditions, reviews files and signs her findings for Northline Mutual, a Chicago insurer, though she'll tell you she isn't really an engineer. Exact in the file, reluctant in private. She burned her father's notebooks and kept one page, folded in the inside pocket of her coat.
Her manager
Reviewer of record on about half the region. Sets rules and keeps them, including the ones that cost his own people. When her name lands on a public filing, he won't ask to have it taken down: you don't get traceability only when it flatters you.
Shift supervisor · Harborline Terminal
Runs nights at a freight yard on the Calumet and walks the south lead herself. She is standing on the paperwork when Kayla arrives on the worst morning of the yard's year, and she knows exactly what every sheet says.
Writes first
An email with no name, no signature and a subject line only Kayla should understand. He has lost someone to the same shape, and he keeps years of the nights that ended with nobody hurt. He says the near misses are the part no insurer counts.
The front of the sheet
A yard worker in Illinois and a paddler below a Wisconsin dam. Different systems, different states, nothing in common in any file. Their names are the first two in Kayla's column, with a line beneath them she doesn't remember drawing.
Her father · from Margin of Error
Born in Chicago, raised in New Mexico. He trusted correct operation and built a model no one else believed. He is gone before the book begins, but his handwriting isn't.
Spoiler-safe · nothing here goes past the end of Movement I
Particulars
Content notice. This book contains non-graphic accidental and workplace deaths, grief, and a parent's past accidental death. Minimal profanity; no sexual content.
In development · order links open at launch
Behind the Book
concurrence (n.)
Things happening at the same time. Agreement. In criminal law, the meeting of a guilty act and a guilty mind.
In this story, they never meet. The intent belongs to one man. Every act belongs to someone else.
The question isn't what failed. Nothing failed. The question is what was simultaneously allowed to be true, and then, harder, who started the clock.
The Catalog
