The Glass Canals

In a floating Venice powered by living light, the most dangerous heist isn't stealing the sun. It's stealing back a future.

Livia Varda is a master forger who has spent her life painting beautiful lies and wearing other people's names. When a Morosini security officer uncovers her past, Livia is blackmailed into an impossible scheme: break into the Submerged Archive and steal the original Lucent Algae patent, the biological master key that controls every breath of energy in the city.

To succeed, she'll need Dario Conti, the disgraced engineer who designed the Archive's defences before the Morosini dynasty stripped him of everything. Dario knows the vault's lethal secrets: the bio-locks, the engineered eels, the fractal codes that can drown an intruder in seconds. He also knows the kill-switch that could plunge the entire city into darkness.

Thrown together by a blackmailer neither of them trusts, the forger and the engineer assemble a crew of outcasts. A pilot with the city's hidden channels tattooed on his skin. A biologist carrying a living algae symbiont that might just talk to the Archive's organic heart. As the crew descends into the sunken foundations of Venice, the line between the heist and a revolution begins to blur, and the cold fascination between Livia and Dario ignites into something far more dangerous than either of them planned.

But the Contessa Morosini is watching. And the truth waiting at the bottom of the Grand Canal is bigger than a stolen patent. It is a secret that could save the city, or shatter it forever.

The Glass Canals is a solarpunk heist romance for readers who love lush, drowning cities, impossible jobs, slow-burn tension, and characters who rebuild themselves from broken parts. Perfect for fans of The Lies of Locke Lamora, This Is How You Lose the Time War, and the eco-cyberpunk atmosphere of The Windup Girl.