November 1917. As revolution engulfs Russia, a dying priest in a remote mountain sanctuary confesses the story he has carried to the edges of the earth.
Born a starving mill child in industrial Manchester, he learned young that human misery is built by human hands—and that no god would intervene.
Yet the Church took the quick-witted orphan in, and he rose within the Vatican. In 1889, an ailing Pope sent him across a continent in turmoil on a secret errand: to witness the truth of the factory floors and help forge the historic declaration that would, at last but too late, place the Church on the side of the working poor.
He did not know that powerful men wished the Church to stay silent. He did not know he had been sent as a pawn—or that the mission would demand the betrayal of the one man he loved.
Now, as the old world burns, the reckoning has come.
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