ahmadzaheen
ASH & BLOOM - Synopsis (no spoilers)
More than half the Earth has turned to sand. The last cities cling to cracked desal towers and old promises, while warlords, soldiers, and relic AIs carve the wastes into kill zones. Khyros Aderin, a desert tracker who keeps his heart shut and his rifle clean, survives by staying out of other people's causes-until a storm blows him into the path of a silent child.
Zhyra doesn't speak. She watches. And wherever she goes, the wrong kinds of attention follow: gangs with nail-crown banners, clean-uniformed "protectors," and machines that remember the world the way it used to be. When Khyros chooses to keep her alive, he inherits every enemy in the horizon.
Their flight becomes a trek through a dead century's bones: glass forests that cut the wind to ribbons, ghost markets that glow for one night a month, vaults of seeds and secrets no one was meant to open. With a gravel-voiced lifter bot and a nervous scout drone at his side, Khyros is forced to decide what he stands for as loyalties bend, debts come due, and the desert starts to whisper about the girl.
Because someone hid something inside Zhyra-something old powers want to own, new tyrants want to weaponize, and the wasteland itself seems to recognize. Saving her might save what's left of the world... or end it faster. And the only way to learn which is to keep moving-into the storm, toward the ruins that still hum under the sand.