The Kaiser's Shadow

In a Europe still livid from the Great War’s after-shock, a clandestine Parisian laboratory hums with voltaic terror: French physicists have weaponised the invisible, wedding Roentgen’s ghostly glow to ultraviolet’s lethal shimmer, forging a ‘Ray Rifle’ able to cook a man’s marrow through his uniform. Berlin’s spymasters dispatch a hydra-headed network—aristocratic dilettantes, syphilitic forgers, trench-scarred assassins—sniffing for the prototype. Standing athwart them is Miss Dalton, a cigarette-cool intelligence courier whose lacquered calm masks a soldering-wire will. Between absinthe-slick alleyways, gaslit catacombs, and champagne salons thick with peroxide countesses, she plays pawn, bishop and queen in a lethal endgame, the rifle’s iridescent core pulsing like a second heart beneath her velvet cloak.