The House That Rigged Reality

By Geoffrey Moehl II

The house always wins. Unless you bring a forty-ton wrecking mech to the table.

Sorrel Pike repairs turbines, bridges, and furnaces. When equipment in her district begins failing in ways that defy every diagnostic rule she knows, the failures lead to a deadly bridge collapse. She measures the damage, documents the patterns, and follows the evidence. Her instruments point to an impossible conclusion. The laws of probability are being stolen.

The rot traces back to the newly opened Gilded Salon. Owned by the Consortium, the casino's glittering "Fortune Chests" promise to turn a five-credit token into a small miracle. But the machines are a parasitic network, sucking the ambient luck out of the district's infrastructure and leaving the working-class town to crumble from the inside out.

Then the Salon gets its hooks into Bix. Sorrel's brilliant teenage goblin apprentice has ears tuned to frequencies no human instrument can reach, making him uniquely vulnerable to the casino's siren song. As gold bleeds into his eyes and his hands shake from withdrawal, the gap between the clever kid Sorrel trained and the hollowed-out figure at the slot machine grows wider every day.

Sorrel is done taking measurements.

Allied with a disgraced Watch captain and a dwarven union boss backed by two hundred furious miners, Sorrel trades her clipboard for the controls of a rusted, lead-lined steam-walker. If the law won't stop the Consortium from grinding Pickaxe Falls into profit, she'll just have to break their machine herself.

A Gaslamp fantasy novel about broken infrastructure, stolen fortune, and the stubbornness required to fix a town that would prefer people not notice the obvious.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GQ9RHDYG
• ISBN13: 9798249752279
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 378 Pages
• Weight: 1.11 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"