White Lights

Aaron Doyle, Lucy, Serena, and the rest of the living list left the Yellow River boats thinking the glow at the mouth might be a city. Or a rescue. Or anything with a door that belonged to them. What they find at the Hekou compound is neither. Floodlights. A fence. A hum that never stops. The dead walk toward the sound the way moths walk toward glass.

Inside the wire, Cluster 7 is still running on borrowed power and bad decisions. There are samples in a freezer. There is a spur that keeps the lights alive. There are people who fed something they did not understand and people who never wanted to be touched. The survivors get warm beds, a clinic that looks looted, and a chance to sleep without condoms for the first time in a year. Desire stops being a rumor. Vows get said out loud. The polyamorous found family that survived Golden Week and Yellow Wind finally has walls—and walls have a price.

Because the machines that keep them alive also call every risen body in the delta. Loss arrives without permission. Someone they love does not walk out. The lights that felt like hope start to feel like a beacon they lit themselves. When the spur fails and the compound goes dark, the only road left is west: inland rumor, a tower, and a country that may still have a fence worth reaching.

White Lights is Book Three of The Delta Dead—an explicit reverse-harem / poly zombie romance-thriller set in China. Graphic sex, graphic violence, found family under pressure, and a setting that does not apologize for pinyin, diesel, and the taste of river water.