They took her to the end of the world. He'll take every step to bring her home.
The Wall is the whole world. To the small folk who live along it, a raindrop is a falling sea, and a crack in the stone a canyon. To Fen, one quiet stretch of it is home, and his fearless little sister is the best part of it.
Lira’s hands can coax green growth across bare stone. That is exactly what the dark birds are hunting. Fen has spent his whole life hiding her gift and keeping Lira safe.
One morning, they drop out of the sky and take her.
They carry her dawnward, to a city sunk beneath a canopy that swallows the sun. There, a gentle, smiling ruler has spent years drawing that same magic out of others like her, slowly and completely. What he takes never grows back.
His machine runs on sunlight alone, and almost none of it reaches the city floor. For now, that keeps Lira beyond his reach. But not forever.
To get to her first, Fen must cross the entire Wall on foot, through one strange new country after another. He is sixteen and a stranger to the road. He can’t do it alone. With him go Lira’s fierce best friend, who can’t stand him and isn’t doing this for him, and a silent, four-armed outsider who fled the deep canopy long ago and has his own reason to walk back into it.
To bring Lira home, Fen will have to learn that the bravest thing is not keeping the people you love safe. It’s letting them be who they are, even when that’s the very thing the dark comes for.
