The Vault of Vell Systems

Kestrel Adeyemi can hear a lie from across a room. She has been fired for it twice. Vell Systems hired her because of it. The company is older than it looks. So is its founder. So is the paperwork in the vault beneath the tower, and the paperwork has Kestrel's family name on it four times, in four different hands, going back to a debt nobody in her family was ever told about. Dorian Vell is forty-six and has been forty-six for a hundred and forty years. He has been tending the ward that keeps the city standing since the night his first wife signed the covenant that put it there. Ninety days until it comes due. He can keep his silence, or he can tell her the truth. One of those options ends the city. The other ends her.