The Cityborn

Book excerpt: The metal City towers at the center of the mountain-ringed Heartland, standing astride the deep chasm of the Canyon like a malevolent giant, ruled with an iron fist by the First Officer and his Provosts in the name of the semi-mythical Captain. Within its corroding walls lies a stratified society, where the Officers dwell in luxury on the Twelfth Tier, while the poor struggle to survive on the First and Second, and outcasts scrabble and fight for whatever they can find in the Middens, the City's rubbish heap, filling the Canyon beneath its dripping underbelly. Alania, ward of an Officer, lives on Twelfth. Danyl, raised by a scavenger, lives in the Middens. Their two very different worlds collide when Alania plunges from the heights of the City into the Middens, and booth of them find themselves pursued by the First Officer's Provosts, for reasons they cannot fathom--but which they must learn if they are to survive. The secrets they uncover, as they flee the Canyon and crisscross the Heartland from the City's farmlands to the mountains of the north and back again, will determine not only their fate, but the fate of the City ... and everyone who lives there.