Iron Winter

December 1947. Three months into Commissioner Walsh’s Iron Ordinance, everyone from the hidden side carries an iron tag and a number, and the city has stopped looking at the gates. Then Agent Park climbs the stairs to Jake Morrison’s office with carbons she was told to sign and not to read. They’re transfer orders, all one way, to a place called Special Facility No. 2. Nobody on the list has come back. The deaths come in clusters, and twenty-two of the names belong to men Jake last saw in August.

The next morning, one of them is on the coroner’s table. According to his papers, he was buried on Friday.

The trail runs across the Sound to Mercy Island, the city’s potter’s field, where the burial crews say there are too many coffins. Only one kind of person gets onto that island: a prisoner. So Jake takes a dead man’s registration card, swears a dead man’s oath, and lets the city ship him out with the coffins.

The iron in his chest still makes him the one thing the hidden side can’t touch. It also has about eight months left before it reaches his heart, and the cold has gotten into it. What Walsh is building on that island could kill every supernatural being in the city at once. When the worst blizzard in the city’s history closes the Sound, the work goes on anyway, and Jake has to get the living off the island with no line to shore, a coal-fired ferry, and nowhere to hide them but where the dead used to be.

The man who warned Jake it would come to this is dead. On Mercy Island, Jake starts to think he was right.

Out there, mercy is just the name of the island.