Open Sky

They cured our diseases. They took away our fear. All they want in return is everyone.

On a Tuesday in April, a shining ship settles into a park across the street from Arthur Pringle's house in Madison, Wisconsin. Others land around the world. The visitors are luminous and gentle, and they ask for nothing. They bring clean power without end. They bring the Vitality Serum, which cures asthma, diabetes, and early cancers, and smooths the terror out of the human heart.

The lines wrap around the stadium. The sick walk again. By summer, everyone is well, and everyone is happy, and everyone has begun, very softly, to hum.

Arthur is seventy-one, a widowed actuary who measures his butter with a digital caliper and sets his watch each morning by a shortwave time signal. He has spent his life pricing risk, and he has never seen a gift without a premium. Jake Hansen, a graduate student, has just watched the Serum cure his mother's cancer, and has found something in her blood that should not be in a living cell. Cyndie Watson, a physics prodigy, has traced a signal that does not come from the sky. It comes from the ground.

Together they find the number, five in six, and the date, the winter solstice. But the hardest thing they find is the truth about the gift. The Serum really does heal. The people it has changed really are happy. To save the world, three frightened holdouts would have to ask it to wake up and hurt again.

A warm, chilling novel of invasion by kindness, about precision, grief, and the price of being left alone inside your own head. Open Sky is a standalone novel from Baldwin Nash, author of Sudden Midnight and Small Town Courtesy. When five in six sing, the rest will follow.