On a chilly February morning in Ashford Bay, a commuter train becomes a furnace. Nearly two hundred people die in a subway blaze that was never an accident. Survivors cough out black phlegm and nightmares; families clutch scorched belongings and demand answers. The city’s transit company insists it was the act of a lone, deranged man — but the scorched skeleton of a system and a suspiciously fast cleanup suggest something else. Ethan Moreno, an ordinary mechanic who crawled out of smoke and left a pleading hand behind, is haunted by one question: what did he abandon? Reed Lindgren, an investigative reporter with nothing left to lose, starts pulling threads. He finds a chain of cheap materials, broken protocols, and a transit executive named Angela Vale more focused on damage control than truth. As whistleblowers surface, evidence disappears, and the city rallies into protest. Reed and Ethan must force a truth the powerful would bury — and survive the pushback. This is a courtroom of fire, a media war, and the slow burn of a city learning how to grieve.
10 Chapters
