What Heaven Couldn't Keep

By: Zoe Hale

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Eva fell because she reached for something she wasn't supposed to touch.

Forty-seven years on Heaven's Watcher Shelf, observing the mortal world from a careful distance, and one night the Veil ran warm and she reached across it — and then she was falling, and the gates of Infernum Academy were open, and someone had been expecting her.

The Academy is not what she was trained to fear. It has a library with a door that knows her hand. A Headmaster who has been waiting five centuries for her arrival. And three men whose attention found hers before she had any framework for what that meant.

Trystane, who carries a fragment of her light in his chest and knew her name before she did. Kalixo, who has spent forty years turning grief into strategy and is running out of reasons to keep his distance. Soran, her professor, three hundred years careful — and becoming, by degrees, less so.

Eva arrived with a notation system, a chosen surname, and the habit of making herself small. She is systematically dismantling all three.

There are things Heaven decided she shouldn't know about what she is. There is a section of the Veil that has been running anomalously warm for forty-seven years, and people in this building who have spent decades trying to understand why. And the answer — she is beginning to understand — has always been her.

Heaven couldn't keep her.

It's starting to look like the Underworld might.

Infernum Academy — Book One