
Interactive choice novel — your decisions shape the story
Meet the 3 characters who bring this story to life: Jaani (tritagonist), Meera Lowe (protagonist), Harcourt Penrose (deuteragonist).

A mid-30s widowed Bengali smuggler who runs salt and letters across the Hedge for her village and whose name is the one Meera has written most often in the private ledger.

A mid-20s Anglo-Indian customs clerk who has kept a private ledger of every smuggler she let slip through the Hedge, telling herself balance is a kind of goodness until the auditor arrives.
The story unfolds across 4 distinct locations: Customs Post 17; The Thorn Wall; Saltpan Village; The Salt Godown.

A single-room brick outpost on the Inland Customs Line at dusk, oil lamp on a plank desk, private ledger closed beneath a logbook, iron safe in the corner, thorn branches scraping the shutter from outside.

A night stretch of the Great Hedge of India — a ten-foot living wall of thorn bush, babul and acacia, broken only by a single guarded gap where a cart path crosses, moonlight picking out the barbs.

A Bengali village half a mile east of the Hedge at night, mud-brick houses lit by wick lamps, drying salt stacked under reed awnings, a single courtyard where Jaani's children wait for her footsteps.

A precise late-40s English auditor sent to reconcile the Hedge posts, who has mistaken his accuracy for justice and his detachment for fairness.

A long tin-roofed storehouse behind the customs post where confiscated salt waits for removal, sacks stacked to the rafters, the smell of brine and dust, a single inspector's scale on a wooden block in the center aisle.