Short Count (Book One of The Tally)

Emory Aske counts things for a living.

In the twelve years since the Burn ended the war, the Tally — the fragile peace built on counted weapons and audited ledgers — has held. The peace is only as good as the count. And Aske has never seen a ledger this clean.

Sent to audit the Hauser Cartridge Works, Aske finds three months of production books without a single mistake: no blots, no cross-outs, no tired clerk's hand. Real numbers have noise in them. These don't. Someone is cooking the books — and in a world where every primer is a promise, a cooked book means uncounted weapons.

What begins as an auditor's itch becomes a hunt across a scarred Mississippi valley: burned terminals, missing lot numbers, and a conspiracy reaching the Tally House itself. Because somewhere out there are weapons nobody has counted since the Burn — and Aske is the only man in the valley who knows how to find them.

Short Count is Book One of The Tally — a near-future thriller about the men who count the guns, the peace that depends on them, and what happens when the numbers stop adding up.

By M. C. Varlow.