The Cleansing Protocol

Mara Voss logs in fourteen minutes early every morning. Today a red flag sits beside her name. PURIFICATION STATUS: FLAGGED.

In Aurelion Prime, the Sanctified Dominion teaches that the Hollowed are impurity made flesh, and that the Cleansing which removes them is a mercy. Mara has never believed it. For six years she has kept her eyes down and her doubts buried in clean data, telling herself the lab work was neutral. Even the test result she deleted four years ago and never forgot.

Now she has seventy-two hours. Fewer than two percent of the flagged are ever cleared.

Her missing mentor left her a cipher, and what it opens is worse than any flag. The plague was built in a Dominion lab. The network that chooses who gets Cleansed hunts disobedience, and it runs on code with Mara's initials in it.

In seven days, the Dominion will release a second virus engineered to make dissent neurologically impossible. To stop it, Mara must earn the trust of a resistance with every reason to hate her and walk back into the building she helped wire. Breaking the machine may cost more lives than it saves. Building it already did.

A dark dystopian thriller about surveillance, complicity, and the lie that data can be neutral.