In humanity's last sprawling graveyard, a locked safe is all the mercy God has to offer.
Radioactive dust drifts year-round like lead-gray snow across the end-of-the-world fortress known as the Dam. In the city maze of steel wreckage, the strong prey on the weak. Rock, a nobody from the lowest ranks, was born with an inexplicable nine-slot safe: radiation and freezing temperatures cannot affect it, and items can be stored or retrieved with a mere thought. Like a ghost, he roams the edge of death, scavenging with this one "divine gift": a single bullet, half a vial of anti-rad, or half a moldy ration bar can keep him alive for one more day.
When the blood of his own kind soaks the rusty iron, and the Butchers of the Rust Nail Gang turn their blades on widows and orphans, the canned food Rock has hidden away becomes a bomb that ignites his compassion. A single kind act brings a deadly siege by a horde of radiation rats. Cornered, he is forced to reveal his trump card: he stores the charging rats in the void, then fires them back at the horde like flesh-and-blood cannonballs! The savage slaughter shakes the black market and draws the viper-like gaze of the information broker Fitch. Even more chilling to Rock is the coin he finds in the trash, stamped with a rocket emblem, and the radioactive fungal threads spreading through his wound like living black worms...
"The old world hid divine power in a safe, then threw the key into a garbage dump." From a boiler-room warlord to emperor of the rat hordes, from the Dam's blood-soaked battles to deep-space ruins, Rock will wager everything on the ultimate gamble across the wasteland, using the nine small slots at his disposal. On the day a nobody becomes emperor, the steel gates of the classified aerospace zone will swing open with a thunderous roar. The truth humanity lost a century ago, and a weapon capable of burning the world to ashes, await their key keeper.
