The Resin Garden

Zhalia Kael has spent ten years learning what bodies say once the people who loved them have stopped waiting for the truth. She's good at it — good enough that families call her after the official channels stop answering. But there's one person she's never been able to find: her own brother.

Rian went missing eighteen months ago in a fog-drowned basin the local shepherds call the Sunken Kingdom, deep in the Haqara Highlands. A rescue helicopter went up after him and came back with its electronics fried and a pilot who wouldn't say what he'd heard over the radio. The official search lasted twenty-three days. It gave back exactly one thing: a page of Rian's handwriting, pinned to a branch three kilometers from the nearest trail, that read, it already knows my name.

When an old man with more money than patience offers to fund a second expedition, on the condition that he comes along, Zhalia says yes before she's even heard him out. She doesn't yet know what that basin actually does with the people it keeps. It doesn't just remember them. It grows them, slowly and tenderly, in amber, the way you'd tend something you couldn't stand to let die. A garden built entirely out of grief, patience, and resin.

Everyone she brings with her has a reason of their own for walking into a place with no clean way out. Kuzbek's family has minded the boundary here since before Bishkek had a name for the country it sits in. Yeter lost her own father to a mountain that never gave him back, and has spent her whole career waiting for the chance to ask it why. Sabir is still running from a war he can't stop calling in, no matter how many borders he puts between himself and it.

And somewhere at the center of the fog, dreaming, waiting, is someone Zhalia has spent her whole life without knowing was missing.

THE RESIN GARDEN is about the difference between being remembered and being kept. About what love turns into when it forgets it's supposed to let go.