Iron & Dust

He was built to break worlds. She was born to fix them.

Kaelia Rane is a Sump rat, a scavenger, and a pilot flying a ship held together by duct tape and prayer. Her home moon of Veridia is dying, choked by toxic red iron-oxide dust that turns lungs to stone. Desperate for a cure, she breaks into the Obsidian Spire—a derelict luxury station from the fallen d'Evremonde regime. She expects to find ancient tech.

Instead, she finds a nightmare.

Unit 736 is a Siege-Breaker: a towering, bio-engineered super-soldier designed to crush rebellions with his bare hands. Abandoned in the dark for ten years, he has become a ghost in the machine, terrifying and lethal. But beneath the black armor and the command codes, something else has taken root. In the silence of his prison, the monster has become a gardener.

When Kaelia invades his sanctuary, he doesn't kill her. He feeds her.

Now, Kaelia must drag the reluctant giant out of the dark and back to a world that fears him. But they are not alone. Director Neturius of Helios Intelligence is hunting them, determined to erase the last evidence of the old world’s atrocities.

With a kill-squad on their tail and a planet on the brink of collapse, Kaelia and Camdon must forge an impossible alliance. To save Veridia, the scavenger must teach the weapon how to live—and the monster must remember how to be a man.

Iron & Dust is a standalone post-apocalyptic sci-fi romance set in the StitchCount Saga universe. It features a slow-burn romance, a "hurt/comfort" dynamic, and a hard-won happy ending.

TROPES & THEMES:

• Sci-Fi Beauty and the Beast

• Grumpy & Sunshine (with high explosives)

• Hurt/Comfort & Healing Trauma

• Found Family

• Cyborg/Super-Soldier Romance

• Competent Heroine (Mechanic/Pilot)