Irvin 7514

At fifteen, Irvin left Dallas with four hundred dollars, a duffel bag, and a name his family refused to call him. He was ready to sleep in bus stations if that's what it took to live as himself.

Then a woman in a gray coat sat down beside him and told him she already knew everything about him.

The Undertow doesn't recruit soldiers. It finds broken, brilliant kids nobody is looking for and rebuilds them into something else: investigators, cleaners, ghosts. Undertakers. In a hidden compound in the New Mexico desert, Irvin finally finds what he never had: a home, friends who feel like brothers, and people who believe in him. The price is that he has to learn to kill.

He turns out to be very, very good at it.

Years later, the news has a name for the phantom who leaves an antique Soviet watch stopped at 7:51 in his victims' hands: the 7514 Killer. Irvin has a name too, one that belongs to the man who once paid to have him erased. And then there's Madison, the only person outside the Undertow he has ever let in, who calls him one night needing help with a problem named Jackie Ramirez.

IRVIN 7514 is the story of how a runaway became the most feared man in the underworld, and of the one friendship that kept him human. You've met him in Where the Fire Ends Beneath the Olive Tree. Now meet the man behind the number.