
Welcome to the United States of 2096.
Freedom is something you win on television. Dissent earns you a stay at a local internment camp, a reprogramming ward, or a disappearance so quiet even your family stops asking. And the boot on your throat has a flag stitched into the leather.
They made it legal to hunt minority citizens on weekends. They turned healthcare into a game show. They spliced the human genome until it wept strange, shunned tribes onto the ruined, burnt edges of the republic.
Noah Harpster doesn't care about any of it. Three-time felon, full-time pickpocket, and professional ghost; he's spent his whole life perfecting the art of not mattering. Stay small, stay slippery, keep your head down and stay alive.
Then he meets Parlisse.
She's a beautiful, biracial climatologist and painter, navigating a nation that has sharpened every old cruelty into policy.
She may also be tangled in a resistance network so dangerous that loving her is an act of war. Her twin sister almost certainly is.
Now someone has put a target on Noah's back and he doesn't even know why.
In a world that rewards silence with survival, Noah Harpster is about to become very, very loud.