"What the Light Costs"

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He taught them to choose who lives. He never told them who he was choosing. For a year, the masked man called Cypher has been arriving first. A Shadow hunter cracking open in the arena. An apothecary standing in the wreckage of Fenwick’s Crossing. A girl from Saltmere already on the dock, waiting for transport. He reached each of them before the King’s Shadow could, and taught them the one thing he swears by: choose, or the moment chooses for you. Now, for the first time, he’s brought all three together on a mudflat outside Saltmere with a job none of them would survive alone. Break into the Iron Spires, the fortress where the Shadow renders the Touched down into a Cure for the regime’s favorites, and walk the prisoners out. Terenoch knows how Shadow sites are built because he spent twenty-five years running retrievals for them, but he has never set foot inside this one. Pilika’s channels turn a little more to amber with every surge she banks, and she hasn’t told anyone how far it’s gone. Tamsin, who still carries the fourteen faces of Fenwick’s Crossing, keeps asking Cypher the one question he won’t answer. Why now. Somewhere at the top of the Spires is the one rescue he didn’t make in time. He hasn’t said her name to any of them. He’s spent four years making sure he would never be late again. What the Light Costs is a tense, grimdark dark fantasy for readers who love infiltration plots, magic that takes its payment from the body, and found families held together by what nobody is saying. It’s the convergence of the Broken Sigil Chronicles, and it can be read on its own, but it hits hardest after the first three. Includes: a heist into a fortress built to hold people like them • magic that costs the body every time it’s used • a masked mentor with a motive he’s never spoken • a regime that harvests the gifted to keep its elite alive • four morally grey survivors who’ve never trusted each other • found family built on a lie of omission For fans of: Scott Lynch • Leigh Bardugo • Joe Abercrombie • R.F. Kuang