The Sign of Life Trilogy  ·  Book One

The Departure

In 2099, your death date is printed under your skin.
Selly works for the company that delivers it.
Then one client tells her the dates are a lie.

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Cover of The Departure by Karla Wentworth, showing a glowing date under the skin of an upper arm

01 / The Book

A world where dying
on time is the only
acceptable thing to do.

The year is 2099. Every person on Earth has a DDD implant in their upper arm — a quiet blue glow that displays the day they will die. The numbers are set at birth, governed by an algorithm nobody questions and a corporation everyone uses.

Sunset Solutions is the most geographically distributed company in the world, a friendly machine for the end of life. Three thousand cities. Soft lighting. Tasteful logos. Everything handled. Selly has worked there for ten years.

Then a ninety-two-year-old woman in a beautiful skirt suit walks into a departure room and tells Selly that the dates are not the truth. That they have never been the truth. And that thirty years of evidence is now hers to find.

By that evening, Selly's life above ground is over. Below it, a community has been waiting for her. So has a man named Vause — and they are running out of time.

" The dates are not the truth. They are a story the powerful tell the powerless to make them easier to manage. The truth is underneath. It has always been underneath. — The Departure
GenreDystopian Science Fiction · Conspiracy Thriller
Length52 chapters
AvailableAmazon Kindle & Paperback
Get The Departure on Amazon

02 / The Trilogy

Three books.
One unravelling.

I Out now

The Departure

Selly discovers that the algorithm running the world is a lie. She has hours to disappear before the people running it find her.

Read book one →
II In progress

The Distance

The underground is no longer a secret. The dead are not all dead. And the man Selly trusts most has been carrying a vote from March 2068.

Coming next
III Planned

The Return

The conclusion. What it costs to bring the truth above ground, and who is still standing when it does.

In planning

03 / The Author

Black and white portrait of Karla Wentworth

Karla
Wentworth

Author  ·  Staffordshire, UK

Karla writes dystopian fiction about the systems we agree to live inside without quite noticing. The Sign of Life Trilogy is her debut, and the first book she ever wrote that demanded to be three.

She spent her working life in marketing — the polite, well-lit version of telling people what to think — which turned out to be useful training for writing a corporation like Sunset Solutions. She lives in Staffordshire and writes early, before the rest of the day has an opinion about it.

The Departure is out now. The Distance is being written. The Return is patient.

  • Lives Staffordshire, UK
  • Writes Dystopian science fiction
  • Currently Drafting Book Two

04 / Get in touch

Say hello.

Reader, reviewer, bookseller, podcaster, or someone with a question I haven't been asked yet — drop a note.

Replies come from Karla herself. Not a team. Not a bot. Probably not at 3am.