Description
On the Montenegrin-Albanian line, a village bakery opens at four and closes at two; behind the counter, someone has spent years not explaining the decade before the ovens. A consortium journalist has been tracing the same Zagreb-Tirana cargo thread for more than a year, name by route by corrupt official. The arrangement holds until Mira Arsović, seventeen, the niece of a dead mutual friend, arrives with a black eye, a pack, and a drive full of what both have been circling. Mira has perhaps seventy-two hours before the network that staged her brother's crash notices she is alive. One path knows borders without badges; the other holds the map, the byline rules, and the line between story and endangerment. They will have to run three frontiers, one mountain, and at least one conversation with a man someone swore never to see again, without a trusted sidearm and without a guarantee the evidence survives the people carrying it. Hard bread, hard silence, and the old trade reawakening whether anyone wants it to.
