The Last of Us meets The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in this stand-alone dystopian romance about survival, sacrifice, and love that risks everything. By encouraging massive accumulations of debt from its underclass, a single corporation, Caerus, controls all aspects of society. Inesa lives with her brother in a half-sunken town where they scrape by running a taxidermy shop. Unbeknownst to Inesa, their cruel and indolent mother has accrued an enormous debt—enough to qualify one of her children for Caerus’s livestreamed assassination spectacle: the Lamb’s Gauntlet. Melinoë is a Caerus assassin, trained to track and kill the sacrificial Lambs. A product of neural reconditioning and physiological alteration, she is a living weapon, known for her cold brutality and deadly beauty. She has never failed to assassinate one of her marks. When Inesa learns her mother has offered her as a sacrifice, she despairs—the Gauntlet is always a bloodbath for debtors. But thanks to years of survival in the apocalyptic wastes and help from her hunter brother, she might stand a chance. For Melinoë, the game is everything. Haunted by flashbacks after her last Gauntlet, she needs redemption. As Mel pursues Inesa across the wasteland, both begin to question everything: Inesa wonders if there’s more to life than surviving, while Mel wonders if she can be more than a killer. And both wonder if, against all odds, they might be falling in love.