In this fantasy thriller, four teens charged with murder and caught with the illegal use of magic band together to devise the ultimate jailbreak.
“Bursting with originality and mile-a-minute action, the twists, turns and thrills kept coming!”—Amie Kaufman, New York Times bestselling author of Aurora Rising
“From its phenomenal crew of misfits you can’t help but root for, to its immersive and enchanting world building, Scholte’s latest will have you savoring every page.”—Adalyn Grace, New York Times bestselling author of All the Stars and Teeth
In the city of Kardelle, magic hides in the shadows. Anyone can call it forth at any time, for any reason. But with consequences that are often catastrophic, even deadly, the use of edem—extradimensional magic—is outlawed.
No one knows this better than seventeen-year-old Cayder Broduck, who once succumbed to edem’s lure himself. Now Cayder is on the straight and narrow, and his dream is to become a prosecutor to ensure edem abusers are punished to the fullest extent of the law.
In order to learn how best to prosecute them, Cayder takes a once-in-a-lifetime apprenticeship under a renowned defense attorney so he can understand the tricks of public defense. But when he arrives at Vardean prison, built at the heart of a tear in dimensions from where all magic comes, things don’t seem so black and white. The criminals he’s meant to defend—a sister accused of obliterating her brother’s entire existence, a son accused of murdering his father, and even a daughter accused of annihilating a whole town in search of answers to how her mother died—are teenagers like him, and their stories are . . . complicated. Cayder hadn’t expected to be affected by their stories or to question a justice system he once thought had saved him. And he definitely never expected to plot the ultimate jailbreak, risking everything to free them.
But, too late, he realizes no one is who they seem to be and everyone is guilty of something.
