Martin Astra

Palenque, 8th century. A boy who counts stars for order in a world that offers none. On his collarbone, K'inich Balam carries a flower with five petals - a mark he does not understand, in a city where astronomers read the sky like scripture and the rains no longer come when they should. He is seven years old when he first tries to count the stars into meaning. He will be a man before he learns that some things cannot be counted: a father's silence, a friend's arrest, the weight of watching injustice from a temple terrace and calling it order.
K'inich Balam is the first voice in a chain that will cross centuries - one of seven who share a birthmark, and visions of lives not their own. The visions explain nothing. They cost everything they touch. A literary historical novel about the small choices that outlast empires