The Dowager's city faces annihilation from the Clockwork Boys — massive mechanical soldiers from a neighboring kingdom that cannot be stopped by conventional means. The only hope is a suicide mission into enemy territory to find the source of the Clocktaurs and destroy it. The people assigned to this mission are not heroes: they are criminals pulled from prison with pardons dangled as bait, bound together by carnivorous tattoos that will kill them if they defect.

Slate, the forger, serves as the de facto POV character — clever, deeply scarred by her past in Anuket City, and armored in sardonic wit. Caliban the disgraced paladin is her compelling counterpart: honorable, haunted by something inside him, and the source of the series' most affecting emotional beats.

Across two short novels the ragtag team travels through dangerous territory, fights for survival, and gradually evolves from mutual suspicion into something resembling a family. The second book, set in Anuket City, delivers on all the promises of the first — escalating the world-building, resolving plot threads in unexpected ways, and delivering an emotionally devastating ending that readers describe as heart-wrenching.