The Street That Went Missing (THE BORROWED ROADS)
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Book Overview
ONE IMPOSSIBLE STREET. THREE DAYS TO FIND HER BROTHER. A SECRET WORLD WHERE EVERY SHORTCUT HAS A PRICE.
Fifteen-year-old Tara Kale has a talent for finding the fastest way through Mumbai. She knows which alleys beat the traffic, which staircases cut across neighbourhoods, and exactly how many minutes she can save by ignoring a perfectly sensible warning.
Then, on an ordinary Tuesday morning, she discovers a street that wasn't there yesterday.
It should be impossible. It leads across the city in minutes. And a strange brass sign at its entrance insists that every journey must be paid for.
Tara takes the shortcut anyway.
By evening, her ten-year-old brother, Rohan, is missing.
His disappearance draws Tara into the Foldways, a hidden network of passages that defy geography: doors opening onto distant countries, trains travelling through impossible tunnels, staircases reaching places no map has ever recorded. The people who control the Foldways can borrow distance from one journey and add it to another.
There is just one unbreakable rule: distance cannot be destroyed.
When someone gains a shortcut, someone else must travel farther.
And sometimes the people forced to pay never arrive at all.
The Foldways are governed by the Survey, an ancient, obsessively organised institution that records every altered journey. Its officials insist that Rohan is merely an administrative irregularity. If Tara cannot recover the original record of his journey before the third dawn, the route home may be permanently reassigned.
Tara has no intention of accepting that verdict.
To break into the Survey's heavily guarded archive, she will need the help of Ishaan Qureshi, a rule-bound apprentice auditor who considers her a walking disaster; Vimal D'Souza, a sharp-tongued keeper of forgotten addresses; and Nico, a boy who knows what happens to travellers who never reach their destinations.
Unfortunately, the route she needs is attracting attention from the Mile Exchange, where stolen journeys are bought and sold. A ruthless distance trader wants Rohan's passage for reasons Tara doesn't understand. Someone inside the Survey appears to be helping him. And the deeper Tara follows the records, the clearer it becomes that her brother's disappearance was no accident.
To get him back, she must devise a heist that depends on forged records, dangerous bargains, a train with a very peculiar timetable, and a loophole hidden inside the laws of magic.
But Tara's greatest challenge isn't getting into the archive.
It's discovering what she's willing to sacrifice to bring her brother home-and who will pay for her cleverness if she gets it wrong.
THE STREET THAT WENT MISSING is the first novel in THE BORROWED ROADS, an original fantasy adventure series blending high-stakes mystery, ingenious heists, quick-witted humour, sibling loyalty and a meticulously imagined magical world hidden inside our own.
For readers who love clever protagonists, secret societies, impossible places, unpredictable allies and stories where the rules of magic matter as much as the magic itself.
Some streets lead you somewhere new.
Others make sure someone else never gets home.
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