Dead Men Leave Instructions

Detective Sera Voss has shot me through the heart five times this week, and honestly, I’m starting to take it as foreplay.

She doesn't remember killing me when the clock resets at midnight—just like she doesn't remember how breathless she sounded in Loop Four when I pinned her against the interrogation table.

Now she’s kicking down my door for the sixth time, completely unaware that the dead judge at my feet just gave me the master code to her father’s secret vault—and fifty million in dirty cash.

Midnight is in 13 minutes. The dead don’t stay silent for long.

I have a rather useful talent: touch a corpse, and I relive its final ninety seconds—the last face it saw, the last words it heard, the secret it died protecting. And when Greyport’s clock resets at midnight, I’m the one person who remembers.

That talent leads me to a massacre from twelve years ago, buried beneath the city’s official history—and straight into the secrets of Sera’s adoptive father, a powerful police chief, and a councilman willing to turn Greyport into a furnace to keep the truth buried.

Every reset and every corpse I read burns another crack into my sister’s pocket watch. Twelve cracks, and it shatters. No more rewinds. No more second chances.

Now the people behind the massacre are hunting us, the city’s next disaster is counting down, and the detective who keeps shooting me may be the only person who can help me stop it. I just have to keep her alive—and preferably keep her bullets out of my heart—long enough to expose the conspiracy.

Thirteen minutes. Fifty million pounds. One very murderous detective. And a city full of dead witnesses.