ATRAHASIS: The Gate — Book One

The day she buried her father, Nadia Esposito discovered she could not weep - and that frightened her more than the death itself.A restorer of ancient books, trained to tell the true from the false with her fingertips, she comes home to Naples to empty a dead man's rooms. What she finds instead is a cold disc of dark metal, a number engraved on its back, and a voicemail in which her father - a man who rolled his eyes at the word soul - says he is no longer afraid to die. Someone sold him that peace. Someone took four million euros for it. And someone is still doing it to a hundred and forty-three others.To avenge him, Nadia descends into the Ark: a cult that promises to wrest human memory from oblivion, run from beneath the city by a faceless god who was once a grieving engineer. She means to reach its heart and burn it down. But the Ark does not seduce its victims with lies. It seduces them with the truth - one reasonable step at a time - and every step down is a door that does not open again.Told in two braided voices - Nadia's descent, and the confession a dead founder engraved on titanium for the heir he knew would come - The Gate is a thriller about grief, vengeance, and the oldest temptation of all: the refusal to let anything end.Some doors you walk through. This one you sign.Book One of the ATRAHASIS saga.