Second Wing

Dr. Osric Lane spent four years learning to disappear into paperwork - filed away in the Choir's archive wing, safely far from the children whose fates he once helped decide. It was meant as mercy. It felt like penance.Then a sealed dispatch and an unfamiliar stamp call him north, to a tower called the Cradle Spire, where the Choir keeps its most delicate secrets: children born with anomalous signatures too dangerous, too luminous, too alive to simply be allowed to exist unwatched.They don't want Lane's forgiveness. They want his hands.At the Spire, under the watch of a woman he failed to protect once already, Lane is asked to do again what he swore he never would - build a housing precise enough to hold a child's gift without holding the child. This time the boy has a name: Peregrine Hollow. This time, Lane isn't sure the kindest thing he can build is a cage at all.Second Wing is an atmospheric, morally knotted novel about institutional grief, quiet defiance, and the terrible cost of being needed by the people who taught you what mercy actually looks like - for read