In a city long-buried beneath the ruins of Botswana, a girl who’s never seen the sky flees the betrothal she never asked for to join a dangerous aboveground mission. The secrets she uncovers will rewrite the future, for her people and herself.
Seventeen-year-old Mbali Fenyang has never seen the sky. Like all residents of the underground city of Madimatle, her life is dictated by an AI that assigns jobs, futures, and even romantic matches, including Mbali’s betrothal to Sian Kenosi-Patel, the handsome son of the city’s most powerful family. She may not love him, but at least her future seems secure.
Then Mbali is chosen for a mission to the surface—the first of its kind in 75 years, when her people fled belowground to escape a deadly storm known as the Bloodwinds. The mission reveals wonders beyond Mbali’s wildest dreams, and dangers even greater, when a bloodwind tears her away from the group and leaves her at the mercy of stormwhisperers, a people she’s been raised to hate. Now her only hope of making it back alive is to trust Amile, the stormwhisperer who saved her life, and it’s making her question everything she thought she knew.
Torn between the life she’s been promised and the dangerous, magnetic boy who insists she belongs with his people, Mbali must uncover the truth about Madimatle, and the truth that lies buried in her heart, before the earth’s rage consumes them all.
