The Cradle Ledger

What does a vampire do when the age of castles and coffins ends?

It incorporates.

In one of the last cities on Earth, that is not a metaphor.

Palladion Biologics sells air, medicine, and shelter on credit, and the man at the top of its tower has been alive for four hundred years. His hunger runs through the clinics, the housing ledgers, the cargo manifests, and the debt that decides who keeps breathing. The city calls it care.

Archivist Mira Venn thinks she is investigating a corporate murder. Instead she uncovers Palladion’s oldest asset: a network of hidden cradles, cold-storage backup bodies seeded through the city’s own infrastructure, each one capable of rebuilding the Founder after death. He cannot be killed as a body.

But the system has already reached her. As Mira builds the file that could expose Palladion, she feels herself being overwritten, one missing second at a time.