The Refracted Pale of Norgund

In the inland city-state of Norgund, towering anti-fallout light-diffusers and perpetual sodium floodlights have banished shadows day and night. Under this relentless illumination, warfare has mutated: insurgent commandos and elite state hunters employ Index-Shearing—a precise technology that bends light vectors through ionized noble gas cartridges, projecting an operative's visible phantom fifty paces away from their true flesh. Einarund, a weary municipal optical technician tasked with keeping the elevated highway arrays lit, stumbles upon anomalous refractions that reveal a brutal truth: state counter-insurgents are using cloaked kill-squads to disappear dissenters, while the radical insurgents he sympathizes with intend to flood his district with lethal gas to butcher every civil worker in the sector. Caught between state extermination flares and insurgent terror, Einarund must manipulate the city's power grid to survive an escalating urban meatgrinder where sight itself is a deadly weapon.