Ember Beneath the Neon

Maren Ashcroft answers a 3:17 a.m. alarm in a sub-basement corridor where concrete sweats in the cold and copper coats the back of her throat, then a flame answers her call, and the night splits open. What she finds in the smoke is something the Cinder Court cannot name, something Magistrate Torren Blacke wants buried beneath procedure and Enforcers before anyone else can see it. As ash hounds prowl the lower districts and a shadowed figure stalks the witnesses, Maren is pulled into a conspiracy threaded through Sable Rourke, the Foreign Envoy, and the quiet warnings of Healer Voss and Dare Solene. Quill Devroe knows more than he should, Pell March is losing control of his own fire, and Isola Vant claims the hollowed acolytes are only the beginning. Each revelation costs another piece of the city, and the Cinder Court Speaker demands answers no one is willing to give. Maren has one weapon the courts cannot confiscate: the fire elemental echo waking in her palm, older and hungrier than the laws that govern it. If she unleashes it, she may stop the darkness spreading beneath the neon, or she may become exactly the ruin the ash hounds were sent to find.