The Lazarus Ledger: He saw what was coming. She saw the lie.

In the gaslit labyrinth of Victorian London, Eleanor Vance is a woman haunted by ghosts—the ghost of her ruined academic career, and the ghost of her beloved brother, William, killed in an "unforeseen" ambush in the Transvaal. A brilliant cryptographer in a world that fears intelligent women, she is consumed by a single, obsessive belief: her brother's death was not a tragedy, but a preventable, mathematical error. Hiding from the world, she spends her days in the mundane safety of numbers, her formidable mind a caged tiger. But the past refuses to stay buried.

Her quiet exile is shattered by the arrival of a coded message, an elegant, impossible cipher that is a dark mirror of her own lost genius. It predicts a minor, specific event that unfolds with chilling precision. Soon, a second, more sinister message arrives, leading her to witness a catastrophe engineered with the cold logic of a mathematical proof. She is no longer a spectator but a chosen audience for the Chronos Club, a secret society of the Empire's most powerful men. They have built a machine that can read the echoes of tomorrow—an Ætheric Resonance Engine that gives them the power of God. And they are using it to prune the timeline, orchestrating assassinations and disasters to sculpt their perfect future, a future built on a foundation of necessary sacrifices.

When the Club frames her for the murder of her fiercest academic rival, Eleanor becomes a fugitive, hunted by Scotland Yard and the all-seeing eye of the Club itself. Her only hope is to find the Lazarus Ledger, the secret record of their crimes, and expose the truth. But the deeper she delves into their conspiracy, the more she fears the answer to the question that has defined her life. To stop them, she must confront the architects of fate, men who would start a world war to achieve their utopia. And to save the future, she must finally break the code of her own past and uncover the horrifying, calculated truth of what really happened to her brother.