What the Ashes Remember - Anna Gerard

The fire didn't just take the world. It took the rules.

They told us the Balance was sacred. They told us the Console was the only thing standing between order and the screaming void. But as the smoke clears over the ruins of everything I once called home, I realize the truth:

The Balance wasn't a gift. It was a cage.

Azeal and I are the anomalies-the cracks in a structural law that was never meant to bend. We survived the heat, but the cold that follows is sharper. While the remnants of the old world scramble to rebuild the same walls that imprisoned us, we are learning to breathe in the grey.

In the silence of the aftermath, secrets are rising like heat haze. The ashes hold the memory of what we were, but they also hide the blueprint for what we could become. To protect the small, fragile peace we've carved out of the wreckage, I have to do more than just survive.

I have to learn how to burn without being consumed.

Because the Console is coming to sweep the hearth. And they're about to find out that some things are forged in the fire-and some things are reborn in the soot.

In the second installment of the Broken Balance series, the war for autonomy moves from the flames to the shadows. When the world is reduced to ash, the only thing left to trust is the heat still pulsing in your veins.