Soot and Silver

Victorian London has a thousand rooftops, and each one carries its own kind of danger.

Zaid has spent his life inside brick throats and soot-dark flues, climbing for a master who treats boys like property and calls it business. Crake’s yard runs on hunger, fear, and bruises—until a chimney takes Jonah, and grief turns to something sharper. Because once a boy dies for a job that was never meant for boys, survival starts to feel like a kind of betrayal.

Across the street, Eadwig Weldon lives behind polished windows and perfect manners, learning Latin by heart while his thoughts drift to the attic, to smoke, to the boy he keeps seeing in the margins of his life.

Their connection begins with scraps—half-burned words, paper birds, a hidden room above a sleeping house—and grows into something fierce enough to change the way both boys move through the world.

When tragedy strikes in the chimneys, Zaid runs—down into London’s underworld, where Bran keeps a printing press that “eats paper and spits out trouble,” and where truth can travel faster than footsteps.

Together, the boys feed the city forbidden words, trading pamphlets hand to hand until even the powerful begin to take notice.

Soot & Silver is an incendiary coming-of-age story across a brutal divide—and the moment a boy decides his life belongs to him.