Ignatius Sorrell

In the city of Kordava, every fighter's strength is public knowledge, chalked up on the arena boards before every match—and where the numbers are known, the bets never stop. Dorvan Kesztasy doesn't fight and he doesn't bet. He steals: quick, quiet, and only long enough to put something back where it belongs, into the hands of whoever the Circuit's rich and ranked just cheated. It's a code, not a kindness, and it's kept him alive in a city that would rather see him hanged.

Then his sister steps into the ring for the biggest match of her life, the odds get quietly rigged against her, and Dorvan runs out of small crimes to fix it in time. The night she dies is the night the world resets—dawn of the same week, same boards, same odds, and only Dorvan remembers what's coming.

He gets good at losing her. Loop after loop, he learns the size and shape of the trap closing around her match, and starts closing it back. But the power that lets him try again was never free, and what it wants paid isn't coin. Someone is going to ask Dorvan to use everything he's learned about the people he loves against them—and in a city where the whole crowd is always watching the odds, there's no version of that choice he can steal his way out of.

Seda Kalanu is a bodyguard in a city where your worth is written in light on your own skin — a rising band called the Waterline that measures how much of the city's Current you've earned, and whether you're rich enough to keep breathing easy. She's smarter than every client she's ever been paid to protect, and right now she's protecting the worst of them: Ilan Mesado, the oblivious, golden heir of the trading house that keeps the sky-borne Shoals of Sandaru afloat. Across the harbor, in the drowned streets below, a smuggler named Tavo Narindu picks locks he has no business reaching, siphoning stolen Current to slow the wasting sickness eating his sister alive one Fathom at a time — a countdown with a name: the Undertow.

Draw Season is coming, when the floating Shoals rise highest and the low city pays for it in bodies. Seda and Tavo have never met. But they're circling the same machine from opposite ends of it, and everything either of them uncovers is going to get someone killed before it gets anyone saved. When their paths finally cross, the harder question won't be who wins — it'll be whether either of them can still afford to be the person they were protecting.