File Nº 1 · Admitted
Book One
The Game and the City
About the Book
Every child knows the symptoms. They chant them in their clapping games and their mothers slap their hands for it: the weakness that takes you, the fever that brings fear, and then the black tears, for the ones who won’t be seen long.
Tomek is twelve, and he can hear what no one else can — the song inside a body, and the moment it begins to play out of tune. It was his mother’s gift. It is the only warning his village ever gets.
His father was the clan’s leader, a warrior weathered by decades of fighting to keep his people safe. And fed.
The Darkness has taken both his parents. Over his deathbed, his father made Tomek swear an impossible promise: Protect them. All of them.
Both parents are frozen in the ground now, and Tomek has nothing left but his father’s hunting knife, his mother’s carved flute — and a companion he never planned on — Yana. She’s blunt, brave, and loud. And tiny. Very tiny, and always prepared to remind him how sure she is that he’s going to get them both killed.
With her by his side, Tomek learns that healing requires listening, and that every song he hears has a price.
It wants a place by the fire, like everyone else.
