Trellis: Book 1 in the Alaster Trilogy

"I mean," I shift my chair toward Leal, "the girl walked through this camera view and doesn't show up in that one."

"She disappeared?"

"No," I look away for a second, "there's nowhere to go. People can't disappear."

Leal rewinds the footage and we watch it another time.

"She's gone," I whisper.

Stationed 6,000 meters under the sea, Gia Hamiltoni lives in the Trellis facility with no way in or out. Where no sunlight shines, Gia and her workmate, Leal, stare at surveillance screens to watch the Trellis community. With her father, Garridon Hamiltoni, as the Head of security, Gia was trained to keep the community safe. She knows that audio surveillance is difficult to understand when too many people speak at once, which is why the community members are discouraged from speaking in the corridors. She knows that certain words- like Alaster- trigger the security system to listen closer to the conversation. Gia calculates her every move, every voice inflection, every second.

The suffocating control can't withstand the weight of questions about what happened to the girl who disappeared. Searching for truth, Gia uncovers a tangle of deception around the mythical submarine, called Alaster, that could provide a chance to leave the Trellis.

In the first book of the Alaster Trilogy, A. H. Ostmo shapes an underwater world that explores belief systems and challenges worldviews. With microbial-based systems and energy from hydrothermal vents, the Trellis facility is located in the most extreme environments in the universe. No sunlight, shadowy creatures, and more pressure than a human can withstand- what better setting to examine the internal conflicts of the human mind?