The books of the Nostone universe.

In Seemos, magic is power. The Nine Bishops, the king’s living weapons, are its masters. Those born without it serve it, and never will have it. They are called Filth. Mika is Filth. She scrubs and hauls for mages who will never learn her name, and she hides the one crime that would see her branded. She reads. Every stolen page is a step toward the east, where a Filth who can read might live like a person. Then her blood wakes, people die, and the truth she was never told comes with it. Her family was erased. Her power should not exist. And the mages who did it still rule. Reaching them means the Selection of Sixteen, a tournament fought to the death for a seat among the Nine. To take her revenge, Mika must master a power she does not understand to become the thing she hates most. One of the Nine Bishops.

Every drop of Steam on Synthara comes out of one hole in the desert. No one who goes in has ever walked back out. Steam is power in a bottle. A sharper mind, fire in your hands, a stranger’s face, any gift you can pay for, burned away in minutes and worth killing for on every street in Metro. People install chips in their skulls and steel where their arms used to be, and Steam still outranks all of it. Those who hold it run the streets, and above the streets they run Synthara. The entire supply climbs out of the Crater, a prison sunk ninety-nine floors into the rock, where thousands of collared inmates haul stone for a system that has never once explained itself. Conrad has spent his life keeping his head down, one drop of Steam to his name and no clan to answer for him. It takes a single Abomination, a machine that answers to no one, standing on a street that had never seen one, to end that life. His sentence is three months. He plans to survive it the way he survived Metro. Head down, debts short, nothing worth taking. Then he draws a cellmate who argues with a man who is not there, and meets a girl who walks the levels without a collar and without fear. They call themselves Freelancers, the crew that takes the jobs nobody else survives. Nobody sentenced them. They broke in. Every heist breaks out of a prison. This one breaks in. Because the Crater is more than a prison. Beneath the quotas, the collars, and the machines that patrol its floors, something older is running on a schedule of its own, and the deeper the crew goes, the clearer it becomes that the truth about where Steam comes from was never meant to be survived. A standalone heist novel set in the Nostone Universe. Complete story, no cliffhanger.