Alice Fairleigh

In the walled city of Awapu, divided by a fragile truce between two rival factions, a rot is spreading. It starts as a subtle contamination, turning its victims savage from the inside out, eating away memories before consuming morality. Inti-qa is a street healer who moves across the city's bitter dividing line. She knows how to keep her head down and her mouth shut—a survival skill she honed the night she purposely let a murderous patient bleed out in an alley.

When Inti-qa is coerced into treating an infected soldier from the powerful Upper City ward, she crosses paths with Runa-uay, the ruthless enforcer enforcing the quarantine. Runa-uay doesn't just want a cure; he wants control of the contagion, and he believes Inti-qa holds the key. Brought into his brutal world as a reluctant captive, Inti-qa has to use every ounce of her cunning to survive both the spreading disease and his obsessive oversight. But as the internal rot threatens to destroy Awapu, the real danger might be what happens when Inti-qa decides to stop running and start fighting back.

Thjora is a master brewer whose finely tuned metabolic ales soothe the aggressive madness inside the isolated Hrafnsker Institute. When the compound's cruel patriarch dies without a legitimate heir, his vicious bastard son, Vargun, seizes control by brute force. Vargun remembers Thjora well—a past tied up in the fragments of their brutal childhood inside these very walls—and he intends to claim not just her vital brewhouse, but her. To survive the ensuing succession war and maintain control over her intricate craft, Thjora must strike a desperate bargain with the man who wants to own her completely.