Borrowing Fire from the River
Seventeen-year-old boiler repair apprentice Nessa can borrow heat from anything that holds it. In her flooded
Seventeen-year-old boiler repair apprentice Nessa can borrow heat from anything that holds it. In her flooded canal city, that gift is illegal, traceable, and sometimes the only reason her neighbors survive the cold.
When a cracked memorial plaque points her toward a hidden network beneath the streets, Nessa discovers that the council's licensed warmth is not scarce by accident. Heat is being pulled from the lower districts to protect the towers above. To stop a seventh-night closure that could freeze an entire neighborhood, she must work with Oren, a rule-bound council apprentice whose family helped build the system she wants to break.
With pipes failing, tenants divided, and every use of magic leaving a cost behind, Nessa has to decide whether private safety is worth the price of everyone else being left in the dark. Borrowing Fire from the River is a tense young adult fantasy about repair, surveillance, trust, and who gets to control the warmth that keeps a city alive.
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The boiler died at four in the morning, which was rude even by the building's standards.
Nessa knew it was dead before she reached the basement. The pipes had stopped making their bad singing noise. No knock, no wheeze, no little shudder that meant the circulator was trying to pretend it still had a job. Just cold metal under her palm and a wet smell rising off the floor.
"Tomas?" Mara called from the stairs.
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