In an alternate timeline, the Haitian Revolution of 1804 doesn't just succeed, it sparks a global uprising. The enslaved armies of Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines not only free Haiti but sail to the American South, where they ignite a domino rebellion across the plantations of the New World. By 1820, the United States fractures. The Southern states form the Confederation of Ash, a brutal remnant desperately clinging to slavery, while the North allies with a rising coalition of freed Black republics known collectively as The Bone Line, a string of sovereign Black-led nations stretching from Mississippi to the Caribbean.

But peace is a lie. Forty years later, in 1862, a war simmers once more.

The book follows Solène Moreau, a cartographer's apprentice in the Republic of Her Bones, a secretive nation that exists off every known map, formed in the wreckage of a forgotten Louisiana city. Her mother vanished during a failed peace mission to the Ash Confederation, and now Solène is chosen to carry the next message, not a treaty, but a stolen artifact:

As Solène journeys across borders, she realizes this isn't just a war of nations - it's a war over who gets to decide what really happened.