Cold Start. Saint Machine, #1

Laura keeps doors. It's the only thing she has ever been good for - standing at the threshold of the dark with her bare hands flat against a dying door, holding it shut while a frightened town files out behind her. She has been doing it for eleven years. She is tired in a way sleep doesn't touch. And she is about to be handed the one piece of cargo no keeper in her right mind would carry: the last living ember of a dead god, the first light there ever was, and the only thing the advancing dark has ever truly wanted.
Rook prices things. Faces, mostly. He can tell you what a person is worth at a glance, which is a handy trade for a man who runs cargo down roads that eat the careless. He keeps three rules. Never carry gods. Never carry causes. Never carry anyone the dark has looked at twice. Laura is all three, and the fee is very good, and that is how these things start. The job sounds simple: get the keeper and her impossible little box down the Lamp Road to the last hold still burning, ahead of the thing at their heels.
It will not be simple. The road is long, the dark is patient, and the two of them are about to spend on each other everything they've spent years learning not to. Cold Start is the first book of Saint Machine - a science-fiction romance that's funny right up until it isn't. For readers who like their love stories with teeth, their apocalypses with a sense of humor, and their heroes carrying more than they can afford to lose.