Bigger Than Us Smaller Than Us: Book 1 (Phosphorus) - Paperback

by Yulia Bumi (Author)

What if the smallest things we ignore are hiding the biggest secret of all?
Sari Saraswati is running the perfect scam. A mangrove restoration project in Indonesia, European clients buying carbon offsets, and a tidy commission flowing directly into her pocket. The auditors never visit. The trees grow anyway.
Then she notices the ants.
They're carrying emerald crystals into the mud. Building structures deep underground. And the phosphorus in her soil isn't just disappearing-it's being taken.

In Morocco, Karim El-Fassi is haunted by his best friend's suicide. Hassim died accused of stealing 96,000 tons of phosphate from the state mines. The evidence was thin. The accusation was enough. Now Karim has found the same anomaly in forty-seven countries: millions of tons of rock, mined and shipped and never received.
Not stolen. Taken.

In Colombia, Lucia López González has spent forty years watching ants transform. Their bodies turning to crystal. Their colonies retreating underground. Their purpose unknown. Her mentor died asking the same question she still can't answer: What are they building?

In the Netherlands, Ali Angkasa receives an email from the woman who broke his heart. She's found something in the mud. She needs his help. She doesn't know she's not the only one looking.

Four people. Four continents. One element.
None of them know the others exist.
But the ants know.
The ants have always known.

Book One: Phosphorus, is the first volume in a thrilling debut trilogy about fraud and obsession, love and grief, and the smallest creatures on earth building something that could change everything.