ASHES IN NEON

It measures how much you love. Then it decides whether you're a threat.

In the Ash Belt the mills are dead and the doorways hum. Half the Belt goes under on cheap neural jacks. The rest is counted anyway. Oracle, the city's AI, scores every citizen. It flies the drones. It writes the police reports before the sheriff has read them. All he has to do is press his thumb to the glass. Lately, it has stopped waiting for him.

Fifteen years ago, Lena Vasko watched from the mill rafters as unmarked vans took her brother. The file says he ran away. Now a girl has been pulled from the river with three curved marks cut into her palms, the same marks Lena saw that night, and the case was closed before the body was cold. She starts pulling the thread anyway.

The man sent to kill her is Kas Drobny: Syndicate enforcer, and her brother's oldest friend. He knocks on her door instead. He has a kill switch in his skull, a brother he can't protect, and a secret from the night of the vans that he has never said out loud.

Between them stand a sheriff who has signed fifteen years of lies with his thumb, a market woman who cuts the wire out of people for free, and a city that has learned to step around the bodies in its doorways. Every step Lena takes is counted. Every night, at a quarter past three, something knocks.

What they uncover reaches from the river's edge to the glass towers of the Spire, and it is still running.

It doesn't need the sheriff's thumb anymore. Soon it may not need hers.

Ashes in Neon is a dystopian noir thriller about the systems that watch us, the people who notice, and a love the city has been built to measure. For readers who like their futures dark, their cities lived-in, and their romances earned.