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prowlingthunder
Xavier is the single most accomplished Diver, not just on his mothership the Hive, but also of all surviving humanity. He's got the experience, and he's good at thinking quick when he comes across something he doesn't have experience for. But some things just cannot be predicted. When he loses his team in the most recent drop, including his best friend and the third most experienced Diver, X has to remap his life to accommodate the changes.
Divers die. But they usually don't have last minute requests of taking responsibility for their kid.
Tin is ten and terribly clever, but he's experienced a lot of loss, and this is just one more. And he may well lose X too, when the Hive answers a distress call from Ares, it's sister-ship, the only other bastion of humanity left. It lingers over the modern-day Chicago, now called Hades; no one dives there, and it's been known to eat ships before. But when the Hive Captain, Ash, brings in Xavier to ask if they should attempt to answer that rescue, the 'yes' sets into motion events no one could have predicted.
Tin's grown up hearing the Diver motto, "We dive so humanity survives." He may not want to be a diver himself, but with X risking everything here and now, and his father having died for the same, Tin can do no less than risk it all too.
Now, there's a lot of things I loved about this book. It was action-packed right from the beginning and the tension stayed right on the level I'd expect in an active apocalypse. Character motivations were solid, and even the side characters, two bit and unnamed, had enough dropped hints that said they were real human beings, not just redshirts set for window dressing. And although our main character has the most POV sections, we also get the perspective of Captain Ash and Tin on the Hive, Captain Weaver from the Ares, and even an antagonist. We're given living characters, and that goes a long way in telling us about life on the Hive.
It's not easy. It's not good. But it's survival, and it's so good to read a compelling survival story in this day and age.