The Violet Window

About this book

Halcombe has lived under the Lid for a hundred and thirty-one years. Above its concrete sky, everyone knows, lies the White: a world of burning light where nothing lives. Tib Marsh is eleven, the smallest and weakest of the Dusties, the children who crawl the city's air ducts scraping lint from the filters. He coughs, he fails every Shade Office test, and he is running out of time before the city places him somewhere worse. Then old Duct Master Hobb sends him into a shaft nobody has entered in decades. Scratched into the steel, in a child's hand, is one instruction: look up. At the top is a round window painted black. Tib scratches the paint away, and the glass is clear, and beyond it is blue. Now he has to decide who he can tell, and what the people who painted it will do to keep it dark.