In Progress: The Lightning-Maker’s Daughter

A teslapunk adventure in the skies over Europe and Asia. If you held the key to the world’s most powerful weapon, what would you do to keep it out of the wrong hands?

1812 Russia: Napoleon watches his troops ignite and melt like human candles at the Battle of Maloyaroslavets, leading to his retreat from Russia.

1918 Italy: Austro-Hungarian forces combust on the battlefield at Vittorio Veneto, and World War I ends soon thereafter.

1939 Europe: A world in the grips of a fertility crisis is tumbling toward another war, and all sides are seeking the combustion weapon that twice altered history.

In London, engineering student Matilda Pickering always wears gloves to hide the tattoo she has had since she can remember. During a trip to Rome, she is ambushed by German soldiers, and after a narrow escape is plunged into a world she never imagined–airship pirates, Nazi secret societies, and weapons with the power of gods–punctuated by a mysterious message from her father, written in Cyrillic: I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.