It was the best of times, it was the worst of times — and somebody is keeping the receipts. What was more concerning is how every part the lie was true...

A doctor walks out of a prison that erased him for nine years, repaired phones the only language his hands still trust. A content moderator in Manila finds a document she was paid to make disappear. A brilliant, ruined forensic analyst in London wins an acquittal for a man with his own face. A Kurdish seamstress in Paris crochets a ledger of names into scarves, stitch by stitch, waiting for the winter when the city will finally read it. And an outrage broadcaster from Ohio flies in to film the collapse of Europe — and finds his own reflection in the crowd he came to sell.

When the leak breaks and Paris rises, their stories converge on an emergency court and the millions watching its feed, where an innocent man inherits the guilt of a name — and the only thing that can break the cycle of accounts is a debt somebody chooses to pay.

A reimagining of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities for the age of surveillance, populism, and the algorithm — told in rotating first-person voices from five countries. A complete novel of approximately 33,000 words.