Payton Ashgrave

The Spine Line is supposed to unite the continent of Pumasuyu. Instead, it's killing the people trying to build it — and staging the bodies in the mud to look like the work of the River Clans standing in its way. Imasha Qhorillay, the railway's most driven—and most exhausted—engineer, wants hard physical proof before the Compact declares a profitable war. Tawri Sankaillu, the Clans' sharpest treaty-scout, wants the truth before her people are slaughtered for a crime they didn't commit. Forced into an uneasy, increasingly tender alliance neither of their commanders will ever forgive, the pragmatic surveyor and the literal-minded diplomat follow a trail of distinctly manufactured blasting powder toward a conspiracy that wants the war far more than either nation does. Love, scorched earth, and a meticulously forged crime scene await.