Ward 54

When Ondine Crawford wakes from routine gallbladder surgery, something is wrong. There is a scar on her left side, tender and newly healed, on the one place the hospital insists was never touched. The records say she is imagining it. The photographs say she is imagining it. Even her husband Peter, gentle and patient, says she is imagining it.

But Ondine is an archivist, and archivists trust the documents. When the documents contradict her body, she digs.

What she finds reaches beneath Ashworth Hospital to a locked ward where feelings are harvested, priced and sold, where love can be extracted like an organ and grief implanted like a graft. The man in her flat may not be her husband. The woman in the seventh chamber wears her face. And somewhere in the ledger between source and recipient is an entry with her name on it.

To uncover the truth, Ondine must walk into the place that emptied her, and decide, with nothing left in her heart to guide her, what she owes the people who were taken alongside her.