The Last Light of Cindervault

The surface is poison. The sky is death. The Veil proves it — a grey, dead valley, looping above the atrium for nine thousand people to worship. It's also a lie, three hundred years old. Cindervault was supposed to be a refuge: a sealed city of 120 levels beneath a burned world, kept alive by the Heart, an ancient reactor that gives its people light, heat, and air. The Custodians keep the rest — your job, your rations, and at twenty-one your spouse, assigned by the Ledger of Keeping. Choose your own and it's a crime. Ask too many questions and you're sent through the Gate of Ash to "view the truth." No one sent Up has ever come back. Renn Voss is twenty, a mechanic of the Deep Levels, and the Heart is dying on his watch. Then, in a shaft sealed since the Founders' day, he finds a brass locket. Inside it: living green moss. Growing. Breathing. Impossible — unless the world above healed long ago, and someone in white robes decided nine thousand people should never know. His father found the truth once. Three days after he asked for an audit of the Heart, he fell from a scaffold. Now the Custodians have a final answer to the failing Heart: the Thinning. Six of the Deep Levels — Renn's home — sealed and left to starve in the dark, "for the good of the Vault." The date is already set. Renn has Sera, the runner he marries in secret in defiance of the Pairing Law. He has Noa, the Warden-engineer sent to watch him, who knocks on his door at two in the morning carrying a copy of the Thinning order. And he has a mechanic's hands, a dead man's locket, and sixty days. The Heart is failing. The Lie is failing. And the Custodians will kill to keep both deaths quiet.