The Clear

In a country that taxes calm and fines weeping, the dead are graded like wine and only the calm can be raised. You are Alder Quen — a small, unlicensed griefbroker on a storm coast, hiding that your sorrow can wake the lucid dead. Then a smuggler shows you a child in his cellar who answers to your daughter's name, a daughter you know died too afraid to ever be raised. Investigate a forgery, a miracle, or something between — and follow it up a thermometer of a map toward the lie the whole state rests on, knowing all the while that the only way to get her back is to stop grieving her, and that stopping unmakes the power that could free everyone.