A rebellious heroine faces a colonial world coming unstitched in Jae Waller's stunning debut fantasy
Seventeen-year-old Kateiko doesn?t want to be Rin anymore—not if it means sacrificing lives to protect the dead. Her only way out is to join another tribe a one-way trek through the coastal rainforest. Killing a colonial soldier in the woods isn?t part of the plan. Neither is spending the winter with Tiernan an immigrant who keeps a sword with his carpentry tools. His log cabin leaks and his stories about other worlds raise more questions than they answer.
Then the air spirit Suriel long thought dormant resurrects a war. For Kateiko protecting other tribes in her confederacy is atonement. For Tiernan war is a return to the military life he?s desperate to forget.
Leaving Tiernan means losing the one man Kateiko trusts. Staying with him means abandoning colonists to a death sentence. In a region tainted by prejudice and on the brink of civil war she has to decide what?s worth dying—or killing—for.