My Time is Water Down a Drain

In the tiered basalt city of Ostra, gravity rules all. Boiling sulfur-brine and mountain runoff feed an empire of precision flumes, public baths, and industrial dye-houses, while endothermic green-spar cooling keeps the caldera habitable. Every gallon is metered, and every thermal debt must balance on the statutory rolls of the High Assize. Tibon is forty-three, broad-shouldered from his working-class maternal stock, burdened with twenty years of archival drudgery, and carrying the unpayable apothecary debts of his invalid grandmother. When he catches a recurring 410-hogshead deficit on Sluice Fourteen-B, his supervisors order him to falsify the ledgers to clear timber warrants. Tibon refuses. Descending from the patrician terraces into the roaring steam and sulfur of the Lower Sinks, he joins forces with Marta, a sharp-tongued bathhouse engineer. Together, they discover an unrecorded bypass network draining heat directly into the private villas of five corrupt aldermen. When the runaway chill begins flash-freezing whole estates into solid white calx glass, the cartel pins the sabotage on Tibon. With martial law declared and bailiffs closing in, Tibon must use his grandfather's forbidden sapper surveys and the forgotten laws of the Counter-Roll to turn the aldermen's own pipes against them before the city boils from the bottom up.