The Smuggler's Code

When a woman is publicly bound and beaten for a debt along the fortified border between Velanadu and Korath, her brother discovers the atrocity is legal under a deliberately vague clause in the Border Security Pact. As two families on opposite sides of the wall are drawn into a network of tunnels used for survival smuggling, they uncover a truth more sinister than the crime itself: the loophole was never an accident, but a back door written into law by those who built the wall to serve their own power.