Description

Layla Ashraf has always been good at two things: translating dead languages and pretending she doesn't feel the fire. For three weeks, she's been ignoring the heat beneath her ribs—that low, persistent burn she's blamed on stress, on caffeine, on the thesis that refuses to write itself. She's a PhD student in Cairo, not a character in one of the ancient manuscripts she studies. She deals in facts. In footnotes. In things that can be proven.

Then a stranger on the metro looks at her like she's a problem he already knows the answer to—and by nightfall, everything she thought she knew about history, about magic, about herself, has been stripped down to ash.

Beneath Cairo's streets exists a world called Al-Asfal.

A hidden city of Guardians sworn to protect the surface world from creatures of shadow. Every Guardian is bonded to a dragon. And Layla, it turns out, has been bonded to one since the moment she was born: a dragon carrying the rarest element in existence, one that's been extinct for five hundred years.

Everyone in Al-Asfal wants to control her power.

Some want to weaponize it. A few want to destroy it before it destroys them. And then there's Ziad—her cold, infuriating, devastatingly competent trainer—who looks at her like she's the most dangerous thing he's ever been assigned to protect.

The fire has been waiting five hundred years to wake up. So has she.