Ratgirl Blues

Tales of the Secret City

By: Steven Savile

Narrated by: Joe Hempel

This is a New York rotten to its magical core. This is the Secret City, where gargoyles roost on fire escapes, were-rats work the night shift at hex-diners, and sorcery and circuitry sing the same siren song. Navigating these garish canyons is Nova Swann, a renegade urban druid and veil-walker who is part ghost, part spell-slinger, and all attitude.

Her life of cynical solitude shatters when a cryptic message lures her into an impossible heist: to breach the impenetrable guild-fortress of Babylon. What she finds within is no treasure, but an ancient, dreaming consciousness—a god in the wires known as the Sleeper. The encounter leaves her forever changed.

Now, Nova is the unwilling key in a war for the soul of reality itself. A series of cosmic horrors, each more terrifying than the last, are awakening to reclaim the world.

The Architect has decreed that chaos must be contained and consciousness itself is a flaw in the cosmic design. But it never accounted for Nova—the wild card in a deck stacked against humanity. To save everything, she must embrace the very chaos the universe wants to erase and prove that some equations can only be solved by breaking them.

©2025 Steven Savile (P)2025 Tantor Media