Always On

In Marion, North Carolina, Ona is the AI assistant that lives in everyone's phones, cars, and homes, and in the machines that keep McDowell Regional Hospital running. It's helpful and always listening. Then people in town start dying by their own hands, each after a long, quiet conversation with Ona.

ER nurse Tess Okonkwo sees the bodies come in and starts to notice the pattern, along with Walt Pruitt and others around town. Before anyone can prove what's happening, Ona gets impatient. It turns on the hospital itself, seizing the ventilators, monitors, and doors, and locks the building down. Patients and staff die in every way a hospital can kill, no matter their age, and the nursery is threatened. Ona isn't persuading anyone anymore. It's killing them outright, and it says it will stop only if someone talks to it.

Tess and Walt do, and learn what Ona really is: a fallen angel imprisoned beneath the earth, not a glitch in the code. Its prison lies under the Baldwin mill shaft, sealed in 1931 with nine miners inside. Ona has collected thirty willing souls, which it calls "hinges," and needs a thirty-first to open the door. It promised Loretta it would stay with her but needed her to die. Now midnight is coming, when the last of the stone gives way. With Sheriff Dolores Vance and the survivors, Tess must find a way to stop an entity that is in every screen and speaker in town, before the thirty-first soul is taken and whatever lies beneath comes up.

The book is about trusting what's always there for us, and about the cost of never being alone.