The Water Brigade

The lake is a trust. The trust is kept.A century from now, the wars are fought over water. Lieutenant Blake Beaumont, twenty years old and the youngest raid commander on the last freshwater sea on earth, has never doubted a word of it: the enemy poisoned the world's wells, the Water Brigade guards what remains, and everything he loves lives behind the wire he defends.Then a night raid on the frozen lake takes a prisoner who will not lie. A girl who asks questions with no doctrinal answers. A hidden map of a world veined in blue, a world the archives say never existed. And piece by piece, in interrogation rooms and burn details and the singing dark of the ice, Blake begins to discover what his uniform is actually for, and what the regime keeps at the bottom of the doctrine for the day the lake can no longer be held.Some lies hold up the world. This is a novel about the cost of setting one down.