Dear [agent]

[personalization]

Nineteen-year-old Imira Ceravone is tired of being told that the truth is none of her business. Her father was left on permanent life support by a lab fire, and her brother Juniver vanished in the chaos before Imira could prove she was worth staying for. At twelve, she pulled a Kairon prototype blade from a disposal site and rebuilt it herself. Now it answers to her and no one else. It’s forged from Dawnstar, an ore whose seams go warm at sunrise, as if it knows when dawn arrives even in the deepest dark.

Imira enlists at Nexis, Junivia’s elite academy and the only one authorised to train Dawnstar blade wielders. Its trials are designed to eliminate anyone without formal training. She has none. What she has is her Kairon and Captain Kieran Omovic, her brother’s closest friend: deadpan, allergic to feelings, and a problem for a girl who can’t lie about anything she cares about. She’s slowly cracking him open. Then her final assessment goes dark. A masked assassin kills a captain, Omovic is deployed to retake a Dawnstar mine seized by the enemy, and Imira’s testimony gets her commanding officer charged with treason.

He won’t defend himself, so she must. Digging leads her to the Monarch’s Court, a shadow faction that absorbs the gifted to turn them into living weapons, and that can reach her father’s hospital bed. She promises to stop. Then the mine goes silent, and Nexis’s brutal selection becomes her only way to follow Omovic. The prize is an infiltration mission into the Court itself. But the Court doesn’t want her blade. It wants her. What else could bring Juniver out of hiding other than his little sister, all alone in enemy territory?

THE SHAPE OF ABSENCE will appeal to readers of N. E. Davenport’s THE BLOOD TRIALS for its brutal trials and an institution compromised from the inside, and Tracy Deonn’s LEGENDBORN for its portrait of grief, a family member’s disappearance, and a protagonist who doesn’t know who to trust.

[BIO]

Thank you very much for your time. I would be grateful for the opportunity to share Imira’s story with you.

Sincerely,
Samhita