The Wick

A novella by Julianna Baggott

Roon is a cacheme, an organic human born of inorganic human extravagance. Her memory erased, she has only one clue to her past: her name. No longer of use to the people who created her, she wakes up in a glass box in a room full of girls in glass boxes, far away from the people and places that formed her identity, her past.

Bukef is a hull—part-beast, part-war-machine. Hulls are built to bond with soldiers, their wicks, for life. But Bukef and Roon form an immediate attachment, each seeing something in the other that they understand.

During an unexpected attack, Bukef saves Roon, and she becomes an unlikely wick—not a soldier, not built for war. Their bond runs deep. Together, they have to outsmart their vindictive creators and try to find the place that Roon once called home.