Trellis - The Alaster Series, #1

Six minutes and thirty-two seconds— that's the average time it takes a person to get through the food line and exit the room. Gia Hamiltoni calculates every move, every voice inflection, every second. Living 6,000 meters under the sea, there is no way in or out of the Trellis Facility. But when a girl disappears, Gia ventures into dangerous waters. Searching for truth, she risks everything to unravel a tangle of deception.

With her father, Garridon Hamiltoni, as the Head of security, Gia was trained to keep the community safe. She knows that audio surveillance is difficult to understand when too many people speak at once, which is why the community members are discouraged from speaking in the corridors. She knows that certain words- like Alaster- trigger the security system to listen closer to the conversation.

The suffocating control can't withstand the weight of questions about what happened to the girl who disappeared. In a hunt for answers, Gia discovers cover-ups about the mythical submarine, called Alaster, which could provide a chance to leave the Trellis.

In the first book of the Alaster Trilogy, A. H. Ostmo shapes an underwater world that explores belief systems and challenges worldviews. With microbial-based systems and energy from hydrothermal vents, the Trellis facility is located in the most extreme environment in the universe. No sunlight, shadowy creatures, and more pressure than a human can withstand- what better setting to examine the internal conflicts of the human mind?