Skyla has lived secretly within the city walls of Bollingbrook for eleven years, playing among the airship factories and trainyards. As one of the Gutter District’s nameless destitute, it has gone undiscovered that she has a unique talent: when Skyla looks at a person’s shadow she sees through it and into another world. She can see people’s fears, desires, their past sins--all as swimming, living creatures. Her mother has never told her the real reasons why they must remain hidden, never explained the true dangers that exist outside the city walls. But when her mother’s past catches up with them both, Skyla finds she must flee out of the city and into a world still recovering from a second Dark Age, a world of adults with secrets only she can see. For a stranger has recently moved into Bollingbrook, a man some call the Pope of the South, a witch hunter to some and a hero to others. When more children begin to disappear, suspicions are raised and an unlikely search party is formed to find Skyla in the hopes that they aren’t already too late.About the AuthorMartin Kee is an author, pseudonym, gamer, husband, Redditor, cyclist, paper-modeler, reader, and musician. He is the author of A LATENT DARK (2012) and BLOOM (2013) He now lives near San Francisco with his wife and their myriad of pets. He is a huge fan of technology, cats, dinosaurs, robots, bad science-fiction films, humor, books, steampunk, horror, ravens, and strangeness.

Three years after a lab accident left the city-state of Rhinewall crippled and vulnerable, its residents still recover from the cataclysm. Power is limited, food is scarce, and violent gangs of children run rampant. Scribble, a mute refugee with an extraordinary talent, struggles to fit in and survive amidst the cruelty of the gang boys in a strange city. Gil, a tinkering prodigy, searches for answers to her father’s whereabouts—or if he is even alive at all. And Skyla, a girl who sees people’s souls as shadows on the ground, makes an unsettling discovery: The Wilds, a stretch of non-reality between the cities, is spreading. Further north, the residents of Bollingbrook have other problems: relatives long dead are appearing out of the shadows, asking unspeakable deeds of the living. As the Wilds encroach on the city, Skyla travels there to investigate. But in doing so, Skyla risks exposing herself to old enemies who may be more interested in revenge than in heeding her warnings. Bollingbrook has changed, and what was once home may now be a trap.

Books 1 and 2