HUNG ROUND

She dug it out of a mountain by hand. The record says she cannot be trusted with it.Two months into the Appalachian Trail, Dana Reyes slides off a wet slab of rock into a hollow nobody has walked in years, and finds a metal plate in a bank of gravel that was laid down before the last time the Earth's magnetic field turned over. It has seams. It has burn streaks. It has a lid that did not open.She knows what it is, because she spent ten years on a destroyer keeping rounds like it honest. A separation charge fired on landing, the lid fused on one edge, and the sequence behind it has been trying to finish ever since. A hung round. Every day it stores a little more and tries a little harder, and every time she turns her phone on, it turns her phone off from farther away.She keeps a log, in charcoal, one true sentence at a time, because the last time it mattered she kept a log and a man with a signature made it say something else. That record is still in a file. When the Navy comes up the creek behind a helicopter, the file comes with them.*Hung Round* is a hard science fiction novel about an object that cannot be lifted, a procedure that cannot be pretended, and a woman who will not say a sentence she cannot stand behind. Told in six voices, from the trail to the watch floor, with the physics kept straight and the ending earned.From the author of *Overtaken*.