David C. Hamilton
Fantasy Settings. Real Stakes.
Some Prisons Are Built To Restrain Criminals.
Mount Draynor Is Built To Use Them.
Psychological profiles. Loaded favors. Work crews that function as a slow death sentence. Everything in Mount Draynor comes down to leverage, and Warden Geneyva Smalls knows exactly where to apply it. When your prison houses some of the most dangerous people in the Five Planes, "leave it to chance," becomes a fatal philosophy. If you get lucky—once you grind their will into paste—you'll be left with a husk you can sell for profit.
After all, in a world where people were built to be tools, repurposing someone is just another way of helping them find their way to the light.
Flick Tambourlane is Guilty.
He Just Can't Remember the Crime.
Flick made his living walking through walls as Venezia's most notorious second-story man. But now he's retired, with a fiancée, a solid future, and a strong desire never to return to the back alleys. Then he awakens in Mount Draynor, an infamous prison designed to separate people like Flick from any source of power. He has no memory of the job that landed him there. Worse, Warden Geneyva Smalls has taken a personal interest in his case and is determined to wield Flick as her latest toy.
If he ever wants to see home again, Flick will need to learn how to work the system from inside. He'll need help from people Arona has already abandoned—a shapeshifter stuck in a scarred body, a gentle giant marked for sale, and a tax criminal with suspiciously honed instincts. But when Flick risks himself to save a new friend, Geneyva Smalls converts that weakness into leverage. She offers him a devil's bargain—become an informant for a system he despises, or watch his friends die.
Flick turns that deal into a con.
He'll need to convince the warden that she owns him while piecing together an escape from soap shavings, keen observations, and fellow prisoners who have little reason to trust him. If he sacrifices them, the mountain wins by making Flick into what it craves—another desperate soul willing to turn the downtrodden into currency.
