A Hand Upon the Lever

What do you do when the truth gets your best friend killed, and you're the only one still asking why? Rusk Obenholm is a journalist. Ink-stained, skeptical, loyal to one person only: his best friend Corveth Aldane, a young orator who just helped elect a president and believes he's changed his city for the better.Then Corveth speaks against a war nobody asked for. He says the wrong thing in front of the wrong people. Minutes later, he's dead in a crowded hall, shot mid-sentence, and the killer is caught before he can say who paid him.The official story closes fast. Too fast. Rusk starts pulling threads nobody wants pulled: a broadsheet's clean narrative, a grieving widow who never asks the right questions, a foreign delegation that smiles when it shouldn't. Every answer he finds opens a door to something older, colder, and better hidden than a single murder. Velthamire runs on coal, smoke, and secrets. Rusk is about to learn how deep the machine goes, and how much it costs to keep asking who's really holding the lever.