Penelope Barber – författare

Forget dusty castles and velvet capes. In this world, vampires are the Sanguine Elite—ultra-wealthy tech-barons who used bio-engineering to perfect immortality. The only catch? They still need human blood to power their cognitive enhancements, and they still burn in the sun.To solve their daylight problem, they built The Apex: an ultra-futuristic, subterranean hyperloop transportation network that spans the globe. Vacuum-sealed and traveling at speeds over 700 mph, The Apex allows the vampire elite to move between continents ahead of the sunrise, effectively living in a state of permanent night.Opposing them is The Vanguard, a underground network of runaway teens who have stolen pieces of the elite's advanced tech. They've modified it to create high-tech exo-suits, giving them superhuman strength, cloaking abilities, and light-manipulating weaponry. To the public, they are dangerous vigilantes; to the oppressed, they are superheroes.

Cassie broke the relay chain on the Acheron, but Vance has spent three weeks planning for exactly that. His answer is the Ascendant — a stratospheric tether rising forty-two kilometres above the East African Rift Valley, above interference, above anything the Vanguard can reach. When the platform hits operational altitude, he can transmit directly to all seven satellites at once. No chain to break. No train to stop.The window opens in seventy-two hours.Cassie has a rebuilt arm, a plan with a gap in it, and a team that includes the one person Julian has never been willing to destroy: his own daughter. She also has something Julian didn't account for — the valley itself, and a brother who knows every tunnel running beneath it.To end this, she has to climb forty-two kilometres of pressurised cable into the stratosphere and face a man who built his endgame specifically for her arrival.

Six months after the Midnight Express, Cassie thought the hardest part was over. She was wrong.When the Syndicate begins moving something vast and catastrophic along the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, Cassie and her team have one window to stop it — from the inside. But the deeper they go, the clearer it becomes that Julian didn't just anticipate their mission. He designed it.Six hundred miles per hour. Eight hundred metres down. No way out but forward.