A.G. Ostrander

Every street in Qashtarim has a level, and every level is a lie somebody's paying for. The city climbs in nine stacked Tiers, and the high ones don't just look down on the rest — they float, held up by Varakh, the only thing that keeps the lights on, the water clean, and the whole rotten tower from dropping out of the sky. One faction owns all of it. Sarqon Dalumim moves the rest: the black-market difference between what the Compact rations out and what people actually need to survive the week. He's good at it — route-sense, nerve, an ear trained to catch a failing engine's hum before it kills him — and he's got exactly one rule he won't break for any price, a rule that already cost him somebody he loved. Then a routine run to save his own freezing district goes wrong, the checkpoint catches him, and he dies. He wakes up three days earlier. Same bed. Same debts. Every memory of dying still sharp enough to cut. The city reset. He didn't — and nobody told him the rules. Now he's got one borrowed stretch of time, a district running out of days, and a monopoly that's starting to notice its black-market losses keep surviving things they shouldn't. Figure out how the loop works. Keep the line he won't cross. Get there before the lights go out for good — and do it again, and again, for as long as it takes, because the only thing that carries over is what he refuses to forget.

In Kallanrosta, every forged blade, every woven coat, every crafted thing is born wanting someone — a thread of purpose that pulls it toward the hands it was made for. Venna Aholehto can feel that pull like an ache under her ribs, and when a thread frays past saving, what's left behind doesn't stay quiet. It claws.

Venna steals for a living — items hoarders and merchants and careless nobles have let rot in the wrong hands — and gives them back to the people who were always supposed to have them. It's reckless, it's illegal, and most nights it barely pays for bread. But it keeps the city's hungry, half-formed Snarls from waking up.

Her brother Kaleno chose a different answer to the same problem: control the flow before it ever frays. He rose fast in the Cordage, the cartel that polices the city's threads — and anyone who threads without a license. Now he's exactly the kind of enforcer who could end his sister's whole operation with one order.

When a simple return job pulls Venna into the edges of something far bigger than a hoarder's vault, she starts tugging on threads that lead straight back to the disaster that split her family apart twelve years ago — and straight toward the brother standing in her way.