Salt & Stone

Salt & Stone is a young adult novel by Victoria Scott, published in 2015 and the second book of the Fire & Flood series.

The Brimstone Bleed is a race whose winners receive the Cure, a treatment that can save the life of somebody they love, and Tella has entered it on behalf of her brother. She has reached the last stage of the competition, which takes the surviving contenders through the ocean and then up a mountain, and the obstacles are not limited to the environment. The rules have been altered in ways that make the competitors suspicious of one another, and the questions Tella has to answer are social as much as physical: how to know who can be trusted when everybody is keeping secrets, what to do when the person she has relied on stops helping, and how to weigh one person's life against another's. The novel follows her through the final tests while the reason she entered becomes harder to keep in view.

Scott writes the series as an endurance competition with an emotional stake, and the second volume is where the contest turns openly hostile.