{ "item_title" : "The Inventory of Dead Cities", "item_author" : [" , Jan "], "item_description" : "At 4:12 a.m. on October 27, a warehouse lead named Marek Voss watches the floor of his distribution center turn into a dead street. The racks become brownstones. The forklifts become rusted cars. A pale system prompt appears in the concrete and assigns him a class he has spent his whole life trying not to be: LEFTOVER.Then it gives him an inventory. Marek can store a dying district into a slot in his phone. Each block costs weight equal to the number of souls who lived there. Each stored place runs on a seventy-two hour decay clock. Unpack it, and it overwrites the ground it lands on, displacing anything living there. The rules are simple, brutal, and always counted out in front of him. He fills his first slot with a grocery block of four hundred and twelve people. Inside it he finds a nine-year-old girl in bare feet who hums a song only his mother knew, and whose left palm carries the same burn scar as his. She should not be alive. She should not be stored. She does not decay. She calls him by a name he has not heard in sixteen years.As the grey consumes the valley, Marek gathers survivors, learns the cost of unpacking, and follows a trail of receipts to a walled capital called New Meridian, built by a man in a good coat who signs himself the Curator. The Curator knows Marek's childhood street by heart. He has been building it, losing it, and building it again for sixteen years. He has also been calling Marek every year on the same day, and hanging up before anyone answers. Every stored city is a place Marek has stood. Every survivor carries the face of someone who once covered his shift, stitched his hand, or left him at a kitchen table. Every system message sounds less like a machine and more like a caseworker reading a file. The count is climbing. The slots are opening. And the girl in slot one is holding the whole world at zero decay for a reason Marek cannot bear to name. THE INVENTORY OF DEAD CITIES is a first-person collapse survival novel with a clean, restrained progression system, a fair-play mystery, and an ending that reframes every monster, every street, and every death without erasing a single loss. For readers of post-apocalyptic survival fiction, quiet psychological suspense, and LitRPG that trusts its readers with numbers instead of stat tables.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/816/589/9798165890567_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "17.99", "online_price" : "17.99", "our_price" : "17.99", "club_price" : "17.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

Overview

Customers Also Bought

Details