A burned CIA case officer is hired to bodyguard a reclusive European arms dealer — but the contract's fine print lists the dealer's own assassination as the deliverable, and the clock on the contract starts the moment he signs.
A disgraced river-ferryman must cross nine tidal gates to retrieve a stolen star-compass, racing a guild of smugglers through flooded cities and drowned ruins before the last tide turns the gates forever.
When a coastal town is cut off after a megatsunami and the radio goes dark, a rescue-swimmer and a retired engineer must interpret a repeating coded signal coming from beneath the flooded waterline before the next surge arrives.
Zeyla Arkut, a discredited route surveyor, races a smuggler's crew across nine Ottoman waystones whose inscriptions hide a buried cache. Every stone she reads costs her another ally, and the last one may cost her the truth she has spent her life protecting.
When a fire-behavior analyst reads a wind shift that command refuses to believe, she must convince a mountain valley to flee the Ochre Fire before a pyrocumulonimbus turns the ridge into a blowtorch, and the cost of being right is everyone who waits for orders.
Vesna Kolar has spent four years inside the Blackwake, an arms network trading through the port of Ostrenza, and believes collection day will end her cover. When her escape route is burned and her handler goes silent, she must keep her lineman alive and decide which of her own officers to trust.
After her bush plane goes down in a remote northern valley, pilot Haldis Pellerin must survive a killing winter on salvage, craft, and nerve. Rescue is months off, something on the ridge is watching her, and the cold is taking her piece by piece.