Neon Rage Weaver

The rage came.

Not the slow burn she was used to. Not the calculated, channeled anger she'd trained herself to convert into useful work. This was something older and less domesticated, something that rose from the place where the glitch-visions lived and the circuit tattoos drew their phantom energy and the ancestral whispers gathered against the dam of her pragmatism.

They crawled across her skin. Digital. Luminous. Thousands of tiny articulated shapes rendered in the neon frequencies of her circuit tattoos, swarming up her neck toward her face. She knew they weren't real. But the implant was producing tactile feedback her nervous system couldn't distinguish from sensation, and she could feel them - each one a point of crawling contact carrying a payload of data she couldn't process fast enough.

She was on her knees on a narrow beam, thirty feet above the water, hands bleeding where the metal had cut them, circuit tattoos blazing white in the rain.

And Elara Reyes, who had spent seven years telling herself that rage was just neurochemistry - just a problem to be managed - understood for the first time that she had been wrong.

The rage was not a malfunction. It was not a side effect. It was not something to be managed or stabilized.

It was a signal. And it was getting louder.

-------

In the climate-scorched megacity of New Tidewater, survival means staying invisible. For Elara Reyes - forty-three, neurodivergent, half-Métis, former corporate data archaeologist turned enclave hacker - invisible is the only language she has ever been allowed to speak.

For seven years she has been building a case against Helix Corp: the corporation that installed neural overlays in her community's bodies, harvested their sacred cultural data, stripped it of meaning, and fed it to AI systems that learned to think by consuming the accumulated wisdom of people who were told their knowledge was worthless. She has evidence. She has patience. She has a found family stitched together from broken coders, two-spirit hackers, and rage-artists who speak in body horror and bone-light.

What she doesn't have is time.

When Helix raids her community and the glitches in her stolen neural overlay begin showing her something that looks less like malfunction and more like memory - ancestral visions, digital insects crawling her skin, code patterns written in a language that pre-dates the corporations - Elara is forced to confront a truth her pragmatism has spent years refusing: the rage is not the problem. The rage is the weapon.

And the sharp-tongued, sharp-eyed network runner who arrives with Elder Mira's message and an unsettling ability to read Elara's silences? That's a complication she wasn't budgeting for.

Neon Rage Weaver is a cyberpunk novel about reclamation - of land, of data, of self - told through visceral body-horror glitches, ritual-tech fusion, and a slow-burn queer romance that earns every inch of its heat. It is loud, strange, furious, and tender. It is not interested in your permission.

• Cyberpunk / Indigenous Futurism
• Weird-Girl Horror & Body Horror Glitches
• Mature Protagonist (40+ / Silver Wave)
• Slow-Burn Queer Romance (F/F) - Platonic-to-Romantic
• Neurodivergent Representation
• BIPOC-Centered Cast & Anti-Colonial Narrative
• Found Family / Diverse Crew (LGBTQ+, Non-White Rep)
• Competence Porn / Ritual-Tech Fusion
• Hopepunk Optimism Amid Grimdark
• Enemies-to-Lovers Corporate Dystopia Climate Fiction
• For fans of Moonshot anthologies, feminist weird fiction, and cyberpunk that finally looks like you.