The Soot Saints

Merrick Bay, autumn 1893. On the hill, twelve Charter Houses keep the electric lights burning and the city quiet. Down in Ash Docks, the soot-stained streets below, people lose small things without ever noticing: a morning, a name, a face they were sure they knew. Nobody asks where those things go. Nobody remembers to. Dex Hallam is twenty, walks with a cane, and runs the smartest crew of thieves on Soot Row. He keeps a ledger with three columns, Owed, Paid, Price, and one rule he never breaks: everything has a price, and you say it out loud. Then a gray-coated banker with very clean shoes offers him fifty thousand dollars in gold to steal one object from the vault under the city. It is a frozen heart, and it is said to hold every memory the Houses have ever taken. Dex needs five more people to pull it off. Viv, who walks through mirrors and keeps a red book of everything her Gift has cost her. Josiah, a disgraced Lamp Order captain who has been sober for eight months and does not trust himself. Roz, a midwife who can hear a heartbeat through a wall. Hollis, a gambler who bends metal and bets only on himself. Felix, a chemist from the richest family on the hill who has never once been told no. Every one of them is missing something. Every Gift costs a memory, and every memory they spend is gone for good. The job goes wrong. The client turns out to be someone Dex has met before, in a place he was never supposed to remember. And the heart in the vault answers to a voice, a lullaby, and a name that Dex has no right to know. The Soot Saints is a slow-burn heist fantasy about found family, about debts that cannot be paid in gold, and about what a city owes to the people it chose to forget. It asks one question: if you could give everyone their past back, would you, even knowing what some of them would find? Fifty chapters. Six thieves. One song with two verses.