A stunning new ebook original story by J. M. Sidorova

Includes an exclusive excerpt of Sidorova’s acclaimed debut novel, . Speculative fiction icon John Crowley calls J. M. Sidorova’s “marvelous.” Karen Joy Fowler, author of , hails it as “everything you could want in a novel.” Now, in this special ebook-only story, Sidorova returns to the world of her captivating blend of fiction, history, and fantasy—offering a mesmerizing new tale of the power of cold.

In April 1814, just days after Napoléon’s defeat by the coalition of the European powers, Prince Alexander Velitzyn, the hero of , is drifting around Paris, coming to grips with the brutality of the war and his role in it. Unbeknownst to him, Alexander strolls through the same passageways as another human being just like him.

Hidden behind costume and makeup, twenty-two-year-old Cherie performs a daily show in the Palais-Royal, a noble palace where shopkeepers and showgirls have set up all manner of risqué commerce—boutiques, gambling rooms, and pubs designed to satiate every desire of the senses. Cherie, though, is an unusual act. Her feat relies on physics, not trickery.

She is a young woman making do with the fate she’s been dealt—not just the terror of revolution, but her own, crippling coldness. Then, one evening, a wounded young soldier named Julien comes to her room, and what happens threatens to upend Cherie’s notion of the world and herself.