Waking Grave
In the city of Somnus, dreams are dead. Only the nightmares are real.
Plagued by "The Wake," a curse that strips citizens of the ability to sleep naturally, the city is a grimy, neon-lit purgatory of exhaustion. The wealthy buy "Blackout"-a synthetic coma fluid-to rest, while the poor stay awake until madness takes them, turning them into "Rakers" violent, hallucinating husks.
Vesper is a Gland-Harvester. In a world where botany is dead, she extracts the only source of sleep hormones left: the pineal glands of the recently deceased. Exhausted, cynical, and surviving on illegal stimulants, she brews crude sleeping draughts for the black market, selling oblivion one drop at a time.
Drayce is a Lucid. A feared enforcer for the crime lords, he possesses a rare mutation that allows him to survive without sleep. But his gift is a curse: he exists in a permanent state of hallucination, seeing a "Shadow World" overlaid on reality. Cold, twitchy, and lethal, he hasn't slept in ten years.
When Drayce hires Vesper, it isn't for pleasure. He wants "Silence." He needs her to use her most dangerous brew to knock him out, trusting her with his defenseless body in a city that eats the weak.
As Vesper guides him down into the dark, a chemical intimacy binds them. But as they uncover the truth behind "The Wake," Vesper begins to wonder: is she falling in love with the monster who protects her, or is this romance just another hallucination of her dying mind?
Close your eyes. If you can.
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