Nothing Lands on Venus

About this book

Fifty-four kilometres above Venus, the floating city of Cassabel drifts on an endless wind, and every office is filled by lot from a brass drum called the Urn. Tamsin Vey, twenty, is a ballast tender and the Firstborn, the first child ever born aloft, and she is tired of being the city's lucky charm. When her mentor, chief envelope engineer Halvard Osei, goes over a gallery rail at 02:11 one Tuesday morning, the Charter demands a Reckoner with a brass Key to every door and record for thirty days. The Urn gives the city the name it expected. Told backward from the day the city's Steward is sent into exile, this is the story of how a young woman who never asked to be chosen found out what really happened, and what the truth cost the people she loved. Nothing that falls ever lands on Venus. Some things do not stay hidden.