The Second Country

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Daniel Croft was unmade years ago — his name written over with another man's crimes, his career buried, his warnings filed and forgotten. Now he runs a network of the discarded: the broken, the scapegoated, the thrown-away, gathered around one rule — that his door has a handle on both sides.

The enemy's door has none.

Croft has learned what the enemy is. Not a cabal. Not a head you can cut off. A climate — a patient, headless weather of power that never hurries, that recruits by warmth, that spends the people it uses like matches and washes the cup afterwards. It has been winning quietly for a hundred years. And it has one weakness: it cannot be made to hurry without, for a single moment, showing its hand.

To force that moment, Croft must reach for the one thing the climate cannot bear to lose — a secret carried in the failing mind of a broken old source the world believes long dead. Reaching for it will draw the enemy's patient gaze onto everyone Croft loves. It will cost him a stone house, a good Russian, a frightened traitor learning how to die well, and, before the end, the best of them all.