The Borrowed Midnight

In Nieuwmarkt, sleep is a commodity. Those who can afford it buy the hours they need. Those who cannot sell the darkness from their own bodies.

Night nurse Mira Okonkwo rents out her unused sleep to pay for her younger brother's treatment. She stays awake while strangers rest, moving through the fluorescent corridors of St. Elian with a neural band beneath her sleeve and a second life on the exchange.

Then the memories begin to bleed through: lemon cake from a kitchen she has never entered, a childhood dog she never owned, fear with someone else's taste in her mouth.

When a buyer is found locked in permanent sleep, one impossible dream is looping behind his eyes. Mira recognizes the room inside it. It belongs to her. Her midnight has been sold twice, and the official ledger has been made to look clean.

Following the stolen hours takes Mira beneath the legal exchange and into the Blue Hour, where memory, exhaustion, and consciousness move through the same hidden market. Every sale brings her closer to the truth and further from the body she thought she could keep separate from the bargain.

To expose whoever is laundering the night, Mira must remain awake long enough to become evidence herself. But the longer she goes without sleep, the harder it becomes to know which memories are hers.

A bleached-noir speculative thriller about class, memory, and the last private hours we believe belong only to us.