In the neon-drenched Megacities of the Solar System, where all minds are linked, Kaelen wants only silence. A former Empath for Yama-Mitsui Solutions, he was violently severed from their corporate hive-mind, left with a damaged neural implant and a phantom consciousness screaming in his skull. Hiding in the lawless shadows of an asteroid belt, his life is a desperate search for anonymity and a way to quiet the ghost. But a random trade lands him a cracked data-spool, and with it, a name: Aris Volkov. The ghost isn't a glitch. It's a man who was erased. That discovery turns Kaelen from a fugitive into a target. Yama-Mitsui dispatches a relentless corporate assassin to permanently delete the error, forcing Kaelen on a desperate hunt. Volkov's consciousness was shattered into seven pieces of ghost data, each bound to an artifact and scattered across the solar system. To find them, Kaelen must forge a dangerous alliance with a secretive Keeper archivist—a raven Uplift who sees the data as a record to be balanced, not a soul to be saved. Their quest unearths a conspiracy that threatens the fragile peace of the entire system. But the final fragment presents a horrific choice. It has bonded to the mind of an innocent courier, who is hours away from a routine psychic wipe that will destroy the memory forever. To recover it, Kaelen must tear the echo from the man’s psyche, an act that will cost the courier his sanity. His hunter corners him with the choice: walk away and let the truth die, or claim it and destroy another life. To bear witness for the erased, must he condemn the living? And what part of his own mind will he have to sacrifice to become a living vault for the truth?
33 chapters
In the neon-drenched Megacities of the Solar System, where all minds are linked, Kaelen wants only silence. A former Empath for Yama-Mitsui Solutions, he was violently severed from their corporate hive-mind, left with a damaged neural implant and a phantom consciousness screaming in his skull. Hiding in the lawless shadows of an asteroid belt, his life is a desperate search for anonymity and a way to quiet the ghost. But a random trade lands him a cracked data-spool, and with it, a name: Aris Volkov. The ghost isn't a glitch. It's a man who was erased. That discovery turns Kaelen from a fugitive into a target. Yama-Mitsui dispatches a relentless corporate assassin to permanently delete the error, forcing Kaelen on a desperate hunt. Volkov's consciousness was shattered into seven pieces of ghost data, each bound to an artifact and scattered across the solar system. To find them, Kaelen must forge a dangerous alliance with a secretive Keeper archivist—a raven Uplift who sees the data as a record to be balanced, not a soul to be saved. Their quest unearths a conspiracy that threatens the fragile peace of the entire system. But the final fragment presents a horrific choice. It has bonded to the mind of an innocent courier, who is hours away from a routine psychic wipe that will destroy the memory forever. To recover it, Kaelen must tear the echo from the man’s psyche, an act that will cost the courier his sanity. His hunter corners him with the choice: walk away and let the truth die, or claim it and destroy another life. To bear witness for the erased, must he condemn the living? And what part of his own mind will he have to sacrifice to become a living vault for the truth?
World
