SUNKLANDS

Every map draws the line in the same place. The line moves.

Callie Enloe reads groundwater the way other people read weather. Four years on the back roads of Shannon County have taught her which springs run clear after a storm — and which ones lie.

So when routine readings refuse to agree, she follows the water. What she finds could upend an entire county: the boundary between two spring systems is not fixed. It shifts with the rain.

A quarry company has staked its expansion on the official map. On the wrong day, in the wrong storm, that moving line could decide whether a district's drinking water stays clean.

Now Callie must walk into a public hearing against a company with more lawyers than the water district has staff — and against neighbors whose land, loyalty, and future are tied to the quarry.

Staying quiet may preserve the people she loves. Speaking may cost them everything.

But the map is not the truth. And the water will not wait for permission to prove it.

A tense environmental thriller about real science, contested land, and the price of telling a community what it does not want to hear.

Sunklands is a standalone novel and Book Two of the Ground Truth series.