Maintenance Mode: Load-Bearing

Eli Vance held one building together with the worst class in the apocalypse. Now he’s about to find out he was never supposed to hold it alone.
Six weeks after Ashford Heights became the district’s most unlikely Stronghold, Eli is permanently tethered to the building he saved — unable to physically leave, even as a second sanctuary anchor forty miles east starts flickering out. Halloway Station’s exhausted, unregistered “Conductor” has been holding a transit hub together alone for eighteen months, and something has started hunting her the same patient way it’s about to hunt everyone else the Bureau ever graded worthless.
To help her, Eli sends the people he trusts most into a trafficking conspiracy that’s been quietly harvesting “F-tier” anchors for a buyer nobody’s ever met — and uncovers a seventy-year-old organization that mapped his own building’s power before the world ever needed the word “anchor” at all.
Load-Bearing is Book Two of The Ashford Cascade: a System-Apocalypse LitRPG about what happens when the found family you’d burn the world down to protect turns out to be bigger than one building — and about the ancient, patient thing that’s just started noticing how loud they’ve all become.
Book Three of The Ashford Cascade available now.