The grid has been failing Peri Blackwood's entire life, and the Continental Authority has never once sent anyone to fix it. So Peri fixes it herself, one theft at a time.
When Kitt Ota surfaces a manifest for a northern supply train running factory-fresh generator assemblies, the job finally looks like the one that matters. Not a patch. A fix. But intelligence that clean comes from somewhere, and anyone with that kind of access is either inside the Authority or stealing from it.
Peri hears the objection. She takes the job anyway, because she always takes the job, and because she has never failed anyone who counted on her. She has a stopwatch, a route, and a number she refuses to miss.
In the capital, an Order-trained fighter named Wynne Kaede is learning to live as a civilian, and is one archive door away from a set of documents that should not exist.
The Authority has been rebuilding something in the dark. The train is carrying more than the manifest says. And by the time Peri understands what she has actually stolen, the people looking for it will already be looking for her.
WILTED CROWNS is the first book of IRONFORGED: post-apocalyptic science fiction about a thief who cannot stop measuring herself, a continent that stopped rebuilding two centuries ago, and the cost of being the person everyone counts on.