Rome, 2073. In a strongroom beneath the city, Luca Vieri keeps the doctrine the Church would rather not have taught. He is the ideal keeper: an unbeliever with a craftsman's love of order, trusted because he wants nothing. He is also a man who once built a perfect case that an institution had covered up his father's death, and watched it dissolve in an afternoon. He has distrusted the hunger for shape ever since.

Then the paper record and the digital one begin to disagree, and the disagreements keep a rhythm. Fifteen years: the indiction, an accounting cycle the empires abandoned and Rome kept. Event after event sits on the grid, and the question Luca has spent his life refusing takes him by the collar. Either the Church has been steering the West for fifteen centuries through wars it never signed, or he is building his father's death again, this time out of all of history.

Everyone he trusts tells him he is wrong, and every one of them argues it better than he can argue back: a conservator who mends broken things and has buried her own reason to go looking for a pattern; a historian who will not let a regularity become a plot; a cat who keeps the only honest ledger in the flat. And above them, an institution that files everything, and that has been reading him for far longer than he has been reading it.

A literary thriller of archives, antechambers and quiet menace, for readers of Umberto Eco and John le Carré, and of Ishiguro's unreliable rememberers. The pace is deliberate and the stakes are interior: the tension lives in what is known, what is withheld, and what a careful man will finally do for the one thing he has never written down. The ending keeps one ambiguity on purpose.

Made with The Atelier Method; it says so on the cover.