THE ROOT ENGINE

Veyr has always sent its costs downward.Cecily Arkwell has spent eleven years trusting the systems that keep the vertical city warm, watered, and moving. Then, in the Founders' Archive, she discovers a second seal someone tried to erase.The discrepancy points to a buried history-and to the living system beneath Veyr's celebrated machinery, a system never meant to be consumed forever.Cecily's husband works inside the administration that keeps the city running. Officials insist every sacrifice is temporary. In the districts below, people have already learned what continuity costs.As Cecily follows the evidence, the protections of the Crown begin to fall away. But the people resisting Veyr's system do not need a savior from above.They need records, routes, workers-and a way to change a life-support system without killing the people trapped inside it.THE ROOT ENGINE is a dystopian science-fiction mystery about infrastructure, power, and the human cost hidden inside systems built to endure.