The Severed Branch

By JOSHUA KAY

**They cut the branch to stop the plague. The plague was already inside.**

Forty-one thousand people are sealed behind a wall the Concord calls mercy - a colony pruned out of the
timeline, its lights still on, its schools still opening on schedule, its dead already reconciled to zero in
a ledger nobody will ever audit.

Captain Cassian Cross has the cure and no way to deliver it. He also has a family the registry has erased
back through its own ancestors, and a clock in his chest that every jump makes shorter.

Reaching the sealed world means prying a cauterized anchor open from the wrong side - and the only crew who
know how are the wildcats he walked out on eighteen years ago.

But the wall has a keeper. She has been logging the truth in the dark for a reader who does not exist yet.
And far above it all, in a garden of extinct orchids, something older and far more patient than the Concord
has begun, without hurry, to close the roads.

*The debt is real. It always was. It simply was never going to be paid by the people who ran it up.*

**THE SEVERED BRANCH** is Book Two of the Chrono-Smuggler Chronicles.

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## Short version (ads, newsletters, 50 words)
They cauterized the branch to contain the plague - and sealed forty-one thousand people in with it. Cassian
Cross has the cure, a family the registry has erased, and a clock in his chest. The only way in is to pry a
severed anchor open from the wrong side. Book Two of the Chrono-Smuggler Chronicles.

## One-liner
A smuggler with a dying clock flies back into a world the timeline threw away - to cure it, and to make the
whole system watch.

## Back-cover hook (print)
They cut the branch to stop the plague.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HHFYJBN5
• ISBN13: 9798171211516
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 286 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"