The books of the Nostone universe.

One child in five is born without magic. A mage can tell with a single glance. The kingdom calls them Filth, and it owns them. Mika has been circus property since she was small, scrubbing and hauling for mages who will never learn her name. Her one secret is a crime worth a branding. She can read, and she has read everything she could steal an hour with. Every text on strains and forms. Every history of the nine Bishops, the king’s living weapons. She knows more about magic than most mages ever will, and she has never produced a single spark of it. Then one night takes everything she loves, and the ash gives up the truth. Her family was murdered by the man who wears the crown. Her name was scraped out of every record in Seemos, a bloodline erased so thoroughly that almost no one alive remembers it. And the power waking in her blood answers to no rule any mage was ever taught. Alone on the outlaw road, she walks east to the War Eagles, once the greatest guild in the kingdom, now a ruined family of misfits. Joining them turns out to be the easy part. A stranger on a dark road leaves her holding a medallion no one can explain. It is her admittance into the Selection of Sixteen, a tournament fought to the death before the whole kingdom, where the prize is a seat among the Nine. No one in Seemos stands closer to the king than his Bishops. If Mika wants the man who ordered her family’s deaths, she will have to become one of the weapons he made. And a girl who has never cast a spell has two years to learn what every rival has practiced since they could walk. The Nine Bishops is a coming-of-age epic fantasy of stolen names, found family, and a power no mage can teach.

Every drop of Steam on Synthara comes out of one hole in the desert. No one who goes in has ever walked back out. Steam is power in a bottle. A sharper mind, fire in your hands, a stranger’s face, any gift you can pay for, burned away in minutes and worth killing for on every street in Metro. People install chips in their skulls and steel where their arms used to be, and Steam still outranks all of it. Those who hold it run the streets, and above the streets they run Synthara. The entire supply climbs out of the Crater, a prison sunk ninety-nine floors into the rock, where thousands of collared inmates haul stone for a system that has never once explained itself. Conrad has spent his life keeping his head down, one drop of Steam to his name and no clan to answer for him. It takes a single Abomination, a machine that answers to no one, standing on a street that had never seen one, to end that life. His sentence is three months. He plans to survive it the way he survived Metro. Head down, debts short, nothing worth taking. Then he draws a cellmate who argues with a man who is not there, and meets a girl who walks the levels without a collar and without fear. They call themselves Freelancers, the crew that takes the jobs nobody else survives. Nobody sentenced them. They broke in. Every heist breaks out of a prison. This one breaks in. Because the Crater is more than a prison. Beneath the quotas, the collars, and the machines that patrol its floors, something older is running on a schedule of its own, and the deeper the crew goes, the clearer it becomes that the truth about where Steam comes from was never meant to be survived. A standalone heist novel set in the Nostone Universe. Complete story, no cliffhanger.