The Weight of Silence

For four hundred years, the Vertica Holy Church has taught one truth: humanity was saved by God's gravity, guided deep underground, away from a surface cursed with sin. Depth is salvation. Depth is faith. No one questions it—because no one who has questioned it has ever returned. Klaus, a seventeen-year-old orphan scraping by in the city's lower depths, never had reason to believe otherwise either. Until the night a forbidden shelter collapses, and he pulls a single torn fragment of paper from