The Unsigned

She thought the war was about who holds the book. It turns out to be about one woman she hid, years ago, under a life she never signed.Quire came out of the flood with something she has never had before: her own name, and a true record growing longer by the day, held in more hands than any lie she ever forged. She thought that was the war. She was wrong.The master who taught her the craft the man now rebuilding the city's register by hand has conceded the ground and done something far more dangerous than winning. He has started hunting a single person: a woman Quire once hid from the dying machine, gave a forged life, and never named, even to herself. Because a citizen issued cleanly from nothing, decreed real by the new book, would prove his whole doctrine true. He doesn't want to erase her. He wants to make her. And the perfect proof is walking Kesh right now under a name only Quire knows.To reach her first, Quire has to do the one thing forgery cannot: not forge the woman a new escape, but witness her a true place out loud, under both their real names knowing that to name her is to make her findable, and to leave her unsigned is to leave her no one at all.A forger can build anyone a lie. She is about to learn she cannot build a person a home the same way.THE UNSIGNED is Book Two of RESTITUTION, a drowned-world dystopian thriller about identity and what makes a person real when the record is gone. For readers of literary dystopia and slow-burn speculative thrillers.