Hush

Open mouths, empty heads, big bytes.

This city runs on sleep. Not its own. Every night the Somnambularium, a cathedral that rents out rest, lifts the dreams out of eight million heads, grades them like wine and sells the good ones back to people who can afford to feel something. Smart money is in mild regret.

They've tried to harvest me five times. My dreams are too heavy: four hundred years of plague wards and spice markets and a woman at a washing line whose face I'm starting to lose. So now they're offering me Platinum for life, which is a polite way of saying they'd like my head on a shelf.

Then a girl naps outside the Dream Exchange, and a collector tries to take her dream, and the dream takes the box. Her name is Nyx Solari. When she sleeps, the world edits itself.

Twenty sleepers have gone missing into the cathedral's margins. The Director wants Nyx next. I've assembled a crew: a dream sommelier who grades everything (including me), a narcoleptic who naps on purpose, a lullaby engineer, and a lawyer who reads the fine print out loud.

We have until the Longest Night to steal the city's sleep back.

Something will have to pay for it. It usually does.