forbidden broadcast

The Last Country Standing

For eleven years, the Republic of Halden has told its citizens the same thing: the world beyond the Wall is dead. Ines Calder believed it. Until 3:14 one morning, when a woman's voice broke through the static. There is clean rain in the Southern Reach. Crops are growing. Children are being born. And Halden is not the last country standing. By sunrise, the recording is erased, Ines's supervisor has disappeared, and the government insists the transmission never existed. Then a pregnant seventeen-year-old refugee named Nell arrives from beyond the Wall. Her existence proves everything Halden has been hiding. Hunted by the government she once trusted, Ines is forced into an uneasy alliance with Captain Kael Doran, a Wall Guard officer whose loyalty to Halden is already beginning to fracture. But the deeper they dig, the worse the truth becomes. The toxic Drift is retreating. Food shortages have been deliberately manipulated. The Wall is not protecting Halden from a dead world. It is keeping Halden from discovering that the world survived without it. And Chancellor Evander Hale has one final solution for a nation running out of time: The Selection. Thousands will be classified. Thousands will be expelled. Only those the state considers worth saving will remain. As rebellion spreads through the Tiers and buried betrayals tear apart the people Ines has come to trust, she must decide whether exposing the truth is worth destroying the only country she has ever known. Because Halden was never the last country standing. It was simply the last one still refusing to listen.