The Eighteen Towers
While three of the world's first listening-towers fail at once — a bridge cracking over a quarry, a glacier closing on a tomb, and armed strangers walking straight toward a secret — Femi and Babu must save all three before dawn, and discover the failures were never an accident.
Across the ancient world the seven Guardian tribes are raising eighteen stone structures that will let Neterios listen to Earth. At Puma Punku a Namboo causeway buckles mid-build; at Carnac a Chibali site is being swallowed by advancing ice; at Gobekli Tepe the Pesahi Guardian's fight with Femi over telling humankind the truth is cut short by a hunting party walking straight at the unfinished tower. Femi and Babu split the world between them, racing each site's private countdown, until the pattern of failures proves too exact to be chance. A tribe-to-tribe placing-song steadies every capstone at once — and in its wake, Babu finds tool marks in stone that nothing on Earth should have been able to reach.