The Glass Garden of Level Twelve
A Novel

About this book:

In the towering Spire, sunlight isn't a right—it's a currency metered by the Sol Tariff Bureau, hoarded by the elite on the upper levels, and denied to the thousands rusting in the dark below. Seventeen-year-old Kael, a glassblower's apprentice on Level Twelve, knows the physics of photons better than the laws of men. He spends his nights stealing wasted beams with hand-blown prisms, coaxing a secret garden to life in the belly of an abandoned air duct: tomatoes warm with stolen sun, radishes pushing through real soil, the impossible green scent of hope in a world of iron and soot. But the light ledgers are tightening, the Wardens are sweeping the conduits, and Kael's garden has just become the most dangerous contraband in the city.

When the mirrors above foul with the grease of indifference, cutting the meager light ration to the lower tiers, Kael climbs into the vertical throat of the Spire to clean them himself—one boy against two hundred levels of structural cruelty. He isn't fighting for a revolution. He's fighting for the children on Level Thirteen with soft-bone disease, for the taste of a fresh tomato, for the right to grow something that belongs to no one but the dark. With a pipe-fitter's daughter who reads the city's veins like schematics and a master who suspects everything but says nothing, Kael bends light around the law, photon by stolen photon.

*The Glass Garden of Level Twelve* is a luminous, claustrophobic dystopian thriller where biology is rebellion and glass is the only material that can hold the truth. For readers who crave the intricate worldbuilding of *The City of Ember*, the desperate ingenuity of *The Martian*, and the quiet, fierce heart of *The Hunger Games*—this is a story about what grows when the powerful try to own the sun.