The Rift has been lying to everyone for one hundred and forty years. Mara Voss just found the proof.With the southern anchor site activated and one Court already on their side, Mara and Kael ride deeper into the Shattered Meridian than any survey contract has ever taken her, chasing a woman who has been planning this for twenty years and a Court Lord who sealed his borders four years ago and never explained why. What she finds at the end of that road is not what she expected. The Bone Court's Lord has been holding the northern Rift boundary in place alone, by blood and will, for four years. The woman everyone assumed was the villain has been waiting to see if someone would find the right answer before she had to use the wrong one. And the historical records that the Survey Authority has built its entire response to the crisis on have been falsified from the beginning.Someone engineered the Rift's collapse three hundred years ago and designed it to take exactly this long. The five Courts did not fail the Accord. The Accord was always meant to fail.Mara is running out of time, running out of territory, and running out of reasons to keep Kael Draveth at a professional distance. The anchor network is almost complete. The path to the source point is almost clean. The thing she has been not-saying for two hundred miles of hard riding is almost out of time to stay unsaid.Dark fantasy romance. The stakes get larger. The slow burn gets slower and considerably more inconvenient for everyone involved.