Every soul is born with a hundred. Spend it, and you’re worth nothing.
In the sealed city of Galcyon, a number on your wrist is the measure of your soul. It buys your food, your shelter, your right to exist. When it hits zero, the iron cuff goes on, and the city works you until the Reckoning, the holy day when the worthless are executed in front of everyone and it’s called an act of mercy.
Micah has spent eighteen years believing the number is fair. He has to believe it, because it’s the only thing keeping his twin brother safe.
Then the city takes Milo.
To get him back, Micah goes down into the dark beneath Galcyon, past the labor pits and the people the Tally has already thrown away, and finds the one thing the regime can’t survive: proof that the number was never real. Saving his brother means tearing down the lie the whole city is built on, and it will cost him far more than points.
For readers who love dystopia with a beating heart, The Tally is the first book in a faith-driven trilogy about worth, sacrifice, and a love that refuses to be counted.
EXCERPT:
I’m steering Milo toward the dry-goods stalls when the market goes quiet in the far corner. The silence spreads like spilled ink. It originates near a man I know by sight, an old cobbler who fixes boots at a little stand near the east structural posts. I’ve walked past him a thousand times without ever learning his name. Right now, he’s standing frozen beside his workbench, staring down at his own wrist.
His band is dead dark.
Two enforcers are already on him. These aren’t the guys in the soft gray uniforms who handle the census. These are the other kind. The ones in the heavy, matte-black armor that every kid down here learns never to stand near. They move with no rush at all, because a man at zero has nowhere left to run.
I’ve never watched it happen this close. I know how the mechanics work, everyone does, but knowing the math of a thing and watching it happen five feet away are two different beasts. His number just ran out. Maybe it was the automated market toll the city skims off every trader just for standing here. Maybe it was a rent hike, a water tax, or just one more ordinary day stacked on top of too many others. It doesn’t matter. The system took the last fraction of what he had for the crime of existing, and a band at zero is finished.
The enforcer unclips an iron cuff from his tactical belt. It’s thick, dark, and heavy, a band with the light permanently choked out of it. He locks it around the old man’s wrist with a mechanical clack that I feel in my back teeth. Then he unkeys the gold band the man has worn his whole life and slides it off. Just like that, the old guy isn’t a person the Tally bothers to calculate anymore. He’s a piece of state property. The entire transformation took the space of a single breath.
He doesn’t fight. He just asks one question, his voice so quiet that it only carries because the market has gone breathless.
“Can I keep my tools?”
The enforcer tells him calmly that the stand and everything on it is immediately forfeit. He says the old man should be grateful, because asset forfeiture is the merciful route, and the alternative is far worse. He speaks with an eerie, practiced politeness that makes my stomach turn.
Author Bio:
Christian Kay writes young adult and new adult speculative fiction that blends gripping adventure with themes of courage, sacrifice, redemption, and faith. Through immersive worlds, unforgettable characters, and thought-provoking stories, Christian explores what happens when ordinary people are forced to choose between comfort and truth.
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