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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.

In the high-walled trade city of Qart-Hadim, survival is not about who you know—it's about which doors you can open. Khezirat makes it her business to know them all. As the city’s master gatekeeper, she navigates the hidden architecture and forgotten thresholds of the lower wards to keep her dying mentor's final promise: protect the vulnerable, and never trust the Merchant Families.

But the city's corrupt rulers have just sealed a desperate, unwanted blood-pact with the ruthless Sutarim desert tribes to stave off a mounting eastern blockade.

Enter Tammuz, an ash-marked, brutally disciplined Sutarim warlord assigned to enforce the fragile peace. He despises the decadent city and everything it stands for. When Khezirat is handed over as his involuntary guide and watchdog, the lines are drawn. She has the geometry of the streets in her blood; he has the authority to burn them down.

Forced into an uneasy proximity as unseen enemies begin sabotaging the magical transit gates, Khezirat and Tammuz must rely on the very things they hate about each other to survive. It’s an enemies-to-lovers game of locked doors and traded secrets—and if Khezirat isn't careful, the dangerous outsider will uncover the weaknesses she swore to guard, or worse, the woman holding the keys.

Oona Keltasen makes her living moving stolen goods beneath the frozen canals of Veistola, strictly refusing to transport weapons or human cargo. When she sabotages a run that violates her one rule, she accidentally intercepts an asset meant for the city’s collapsing syndicate. Instead of finding a buyer, she is brought before its new head, Taisto Härminen. Taisto has just received an inheritance nobody wanted: a crumbling criminal empire under siege from rival families and a legitimate shipping front that desperately needs a spouse to secure its vulnerable voting board. Instead of killing Oona, Taisto corners her into a marriage of survival, locking her inside his heavily fortified estate. Now Oona is trapped in a house surrounded by enemies, bound to a man whose obsession with her is as dangerous as the assassins at his gates. To survive the siege, she must use all her smuggling instincts to repel the threats outside, all while negotiating a deadly attraction to the captor who refuses to let her go.

Beatriz Soriano is a university bookkeeper with a dangerous quirk: she is terrible at lying, but she can read people's souls and secrets like balanced ledgers. In the college town of Osorio, funded by a massive haunted endowment, ghosts and magic are currency. When Beatriz is unknowingly drafted into a supernatural proxy war, she finds herself physically and fundamentally mirrored against Valentin Montoya—a dangerously capable enforcer fighting for the opposition. As they exchange blows and uncover secrets in alternating turns, both realize they are fighting a war where neither side knows who actually pays their wages. To survive the unseen masters of the endowment, the human ledger and the rival proxy must calculate the true cost of their survival, risking the very souls they guard.

Tomiya survives the ash-choked ruins of her clan's territory by reading the history of broken things. When a blood-feud between her people and the rival Mokude clan threatens to wipe both out, the elders force a ceasefire through a volatile marriage. Tomiya is offered as the bride to Sashiro, the Mokude's ruthless heir. Confined within the failing walls of the Kashiro compound—a neutral fortress meant to keep them safe, but which instead locks them in with armed retainers from both sides—Tomiya must navigate a deadly new life. She isn't there for peace. She's there to keep a promise to the brother who died in the feud: to find the hidden cache of Mokude arms stashed within the compound and bleed them dry. But Sashiro is watching her every move, and survival means drawing dangerously close to the enemy.