The Names They Erased

A correction says the book was wrong. A strike says the world was wrong.

Maelin Reeve has been an Imperial Enumerator for eleven years, and this is her first Great Census. Thirty days before the lock, a widow tells her about a hamlet up the Velrun road. The road book has no such place. Neither does the tax copy, the temple copy, or the twelve years of ledgers behind them. Six households remember it. Not one record admits it.

Somebody has taken a village out of the world, and what erasure leaves behind does not stay where it was put. In the Northmarch the officially denied dead walk home to households that buried them. A diplomat petitions the Empire for permission to exist. A thief with no entry in any book steals a packet he cannot safely read. And a hunter who has killed the Struck for twenty-two years is beginning to recognize them.

Maelin joined the Register because records were supposed to keep people from disappearing. She has thirty days to find out what it was built to do instead.

Book One of a four-book cycle.