I.A. Dalton

They tell the wounded the Sula Order is salvation. They lie.

Pela works the shadow-shift at Mola Hospital, a decaying, blood-soaked sanctuary parked right on the continental borderline. Her trade is the Rua—a vile, outlawed magic that plucks the unvarnished truth directly from the living marrow of mutilated soldiers. It is a one-way ticket to an execution post if Warden Bato catches her. But when opposing infantrymen start arriving with internal rot that feels meticulously engineered to strip the spirit while leaving the flesh, Pela realizes the neutral hospital is not just treating the war. It is mutating it.

Trapped in a locked-room nightmare where carrying a blade means immediate death and the surgeons smell of faint lye, Pela must weaponize her illicit craft to pry confessions from the dying. She has to out-maneuver the brutal wardens, decode the contagion, and decide what a manufactured peace is truly worth—before the rot crawls into her own bones. In a sanctuary built on compulsory healing, uncovering the disease is treason.

Every night the city of Osumadu marches out its dead to hold the line against what waits in the ash-wastes. To feed that army, the living must bleed. Nduoma is a way-keeper, master of the city's hidden locks and forgotten gates, making a dangerous living moving illicit grain and desperate people through the cracks in the walls. When a botched smuggling run unearths a sealed vault beneath the oldest district, she finds proof that the city’s founding compact is a lie: the dead aren't marching to protect Osumadu, but to keep something else imprisoned. Now, hunted by the ruling factions who will execute anyone to keep the truth buried, Nduoma must use every locked door and secret passage she knows to tear down the city's foundation before the dead finally turn around and march home.