Seconds: The Shared Soul Chronicles

By Brindi Quinn

“The scarlet tattoo marked him as one who had never been born. It marked him as a Second.”

In the age of inventors, Seconds are beings that were never meant to exist. Split personalities that possess thoughts, feelings, and bodies separate of the people who spawned them, Seconds are seen as a nuisance to the residents of the mechanized city of St. Laran.

Eighteen-year-old heiress Tide Yondo has never met a Second. Kept sheltered from the public at the top of the city’s highest apartment complex under the watchful eye of her father’s lawyer, she frequently sneaks out in hopes of moonlighting as a scrap climber, fulfilling ruin-exploration quests in the wasteland beyond the walls of the city.

When, on the day of her huntress licensing test, Tide meets her first Second, she quickly realizes he’s nothing like the ‘despair in a suit of flesh’ her friends warned her about. The Second, known as Rye, is fun, cute, and seems as solid as any other person she’s met, save for the red tattoo on his neck identifying him as one who shouldn’t exist.

But as Tide and Rye’s fast friendship over their love of scrap climbing begins to develop into forbidden feelings, both start to question their chance meeting. Tide has been blacking out and claims to have a serpentine demon after her, Rye feels like he may have met Tide before being split from his primary personality, and there seem to be outside forces trying to drive them apart.

Through steam-filled ruins and dangerous hunts, Tide and Rye slowly mend the pieces of their fractured pasts as they work together to discover the secrets of the soul.