The Pact: The Ruin Cycle Book One

By: Argent, E. L.

He builds the future with steel. She builds it with spores. To save the new world, they'll have to break the one rule they both live by: Work alone.

Runa Dahl is a Regenerator.
In the scorched Neosho Basin, she doesn't just study the dust-she coaxes it back to life. After a public failure destroyed her career, she retreated to a high-tech hermitage, trusting only her data and the mycelial networks that never lie. She has a secret legacy to hide, and a single rule to survive: No partners.

Mateo Carter is the "Architect of Ambition."
He builds gleaming spires of smart-glass and optimism, believing that with enough code, humanity can engineer its way out of the apocalypse. To Runa, he is everything wrong with the Reconstruction: arrogant, detached, and dangerously attractive.
But when a genetic blight begins to dissolve Runa's work from the inside out, the Council forces them into a high-stakes collaboration. Locked together in a quarantined lab, they must bridge the divide between her biology and his engineering.
As they hunt a saboteur using Runa's own family motto-Progress Without Rot-they uncover a conspiracy buried deep in the "Boneyard" of the old world. Runa is the granddaughter of the oligarchs who broke the planet, and someone is waking up their legacy.

Competence meets chemistry.
With a weaponized pathogen spreading and the city's foundation crumbling, Runa and Mateo must fuse their methods to engineer a cure. But the most dangerous reaction isn't in the test tube-it's the heat rising between them.
Perfect for fans of the problem-solving in The Martian and the slow-burn intensity of The X-Files.

The Regenerator Series:
Book 1: The Pact
Book 2: Sovereign Glass (Coming May 2026)

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0G4JNGQ8Z
• ISBN13: 9798994046807
• Release Date: November 2025
• Publisher: Triform Press
• Length: 262 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"