The Five from Nouvelle Bruges

In an occupied city where every movement is documented and every document is monitored, a hotel concierge discovers five names in an overnight manifest bearing a designation that appears in no official vocabulary. The designation means one thing: these men are to be made to vanish. Élise Marceau has spent eleven months reading every document that crosses her desk. She has mapped the occupation's administrative systems with the same thoroughness she brings to managing the Hôtel Aurore. She knows how the apparatus works - and, more usefully, she knows where it doesn't. The five men she sets out to save are a railway freight scheduler, a former detective, a structural engineer, a linguist, and a shipping logistics administrator - professionals whose expertise the occupation has decided constitutes a threat. What follows is not a rescue. It is an argument in document form: a demonstration that systems can be defeated from within, using their own logic, by people who understand them. From a hotel concierge desk in an occupied city to an interstellar merchant vessel carrying a secret cargo, The Five from Nouvelle Bruges is a novel about competence as resistance, documentation as action, and the specific, unheroic courage of people who pay close attention. Continuing the world of The Concierge of Hôtel Aurore - and complete in itself.