T.H. Bellamy

Tamsin Fletcher has spent her life negotiating on behalf of the wagon-merchants and craft-halls, turning empty hands into temporary truces. She has never carried leverage of her own. When the reclusive Court of the Barrow-Mark unseals its borders to outsiders for the first time in a generation, Tamsin is sent to negotiate an end to a vicious proxy war bleeding the trade routes dry. But on the eve of a breakthrough, she is murdered—only to pry her eyes open exactly thirty days earlier, on the day the crossing opened.

Trapped in a closed stretch of time, Tamsin discovers she retains every secret she learns, but each repetition demands a physical toll from her strength. The proxy war she was sent to stop is being manipulated by a faceless director using the Barrow-Mark's shifting physical architecture: an ancient, subterranean mechanism of turning gears and kinetic locks known as the Brass Wheel. To break the cycle and claim unassailable leverage, Tamsin must forge a dangerous alliance with Vance Ironwright, the ruthless mercenary commander fighting on the wrong side of the proxy war. Together, they have exactly thirty days to map the physical puzzle of the Wheel, uncover the war's true architect, and stop the gears from locking the borders, and Tamsin's life, away forever.

Under the azure waters of Nyanza-Moyo, Folasade-Oma is an unstoppable warrior, using flash-frozen coral structures to shatter enemy hulls and protect her island home. On the mainland, Kwame-Eke is the premier siege engineer, building towering assault barges destined to bring the islanders to their knees. But when Folasade boards his flagship to sink it and Kwame refuses to abandon his masterpiece, a sudden storm wrecks the barge and drags them both into a perilous, forgotten submerged labyrinth. Armed with only a handful of crystal-forming sponges and Kwame's mechanical wits, the fierce diver and the charming engineer must fight their way through ancient perils. In the depths, surviving means trusting the enemy—and surrendering to a passion deeper than the sea.