The Hollow Clock

What they don't tell you is that you'll still be conscious.Every lamp in Hollowmere is burning someone's name. The city runs on soul-light. Sign the paper at the Hall of Records and your name lifts off you like sand through your fingers. Your family gets a pension. Your sister gets an education. You get sixty years as a frequency in a copper pipe, keeping the streetlamps violet. The Church of the Mechanismus calls this transcendence. Lord Callum Vane calls it what it is. He has spent seven hundred days locked in the Ravencrest Institute with a stack of papers he calls the Record — two years of ink, two years of names the city has agreed to forget. Cal can hear them. The Vane gift means the pipes do not sound like metal to him. They sound like a choir. Then a man in a waxed canvas coat opens his door and says he was hired to find something else, and has decided to take Cal instead. Fenwick has no interest in martyrs. Cal has nothing but a list. Between them and the truth beneath the Sovereign’s Cradle stand a Church that has perfected the paperwork of erasure, a family that built the machine, and a clock that has not missed a second in sixty years. One of those things is about to stop. Book One of the Hollow Clock Saga. The story continues in The Hollow Cathedral and concludes in The Hollow City — the complete trilogy is available now. Gaslamp fantasy with a slow-burn M/M romance at its heart, for readers of Freya Marske, C.L. Polk, and KJ Charles. Dark, but never hopeless: this saga ends with both of them still standing.