The unmapped ward

In Caddenport, you pay your taxes in memories.

Every quarter, citizens sit in the Levy Halls, a crown lowered onto their heads, and give up a little of their past to the Revenue: a holiday, a first kiss, the smell of a grandmother’s kitchen. The law guarantees a Floor, the core of who you are, which can never be taken. Petra Lusk has spent fourteen years as an auditor making sure the numbers add up.

Then they don’t.

An entire district, thirty-eight thousand people, was assessed in a single week in 2067 and yielded more than any ward in history. Now it doesn’t appear on any map. The trams don’t stop there. Nobody Petra asks has ever heard of it. And in a tin under her bath, her own receipts list things she can’t remember losing, including, worth almost nothing, “having had a brother.”

To find out what happened to Fennick Reach, Petra will have to cross a bridge that officially leads nowhere, break the law she has served all her life, and face the worst thing of all: the person who signed the certificate.

A gripping near-future thriller about identity, grief and the price of peace, for readers of Black Mirror, Never Let Me Go and The Memory Police.

📖 248 pages