The Severed Branch

**They cut the branch to stop the plague. The plague was already inside.** Forty-one thousand people are sealed behind a wall the Concord calls mercy - a colony pruned out of the timeline, its lights still on, its schools still opening on schedule, its dead already reconciled to zero in >Captain Cassian Cross has the cure and no way to deliver it. He also has a family the registry has erased >Reaching the sealed world means prying a cauterized anchor open from the wrong side - and the only crew who >But the wall has a keeper. She has been logging the truth in the dark for a reader who does not exist yet. And far above it all, in a garden of extinct orchids, something older and far more patient than the Concord >*The debt is real. It always was. It simply was never going to be paid by the people who ran it up.* **THE SEVERED BRANCH** is Book Two of the Chrono-Smuggler Chronicles. --- ## Short version (ads, newsletters, 50 words) They cauterized the branch to contain the plague - and sealed forty-one thousand people in with it. Cassian Cross has the cure, a family the registry has erased, and a clock in his chest. The only way in is to pry a >## One-liner A smuggler with a dying clock flies back into a world the timeline threw away - to cure it, and to make the >## Back-cover hook (print) They cut the branch to stop the plague.