Zero Variance

A perfect future was engineered. No one was supposed to question it. Twenty-five years after an engineered genocide called "The Onset" shattered civilization, the world is divided. The Sanctums are gilded utopias - disease extinct, air filtered, every heartbeat monitored. Outside the walls, the Colonies starve in the toxic, lawless Wastes. The perfection is a lie. Kai Valerius is the High Chancellor's heir, with a mind built to exploit the system's blind spots. While his siblings perform for the surveillance grid, Kai is scanning it for cracks. Signals from dead zones. Digital ghosts. A hidden algorithm predicting events before they happen. In the Wastes, James Cross, a former criminal turned Colony leader, is fighting a different war. When an unseen force obliterates a Reaper army and heals his critically wounded son without a scar, James realizes his family is caught in a shadow conflict that rewrites everything he understands about power. As a warlord marches on the Sanctums and the fragile peace fractures, Kai and James form an uneasy alliance. The deeper they dig, the clearer it becomes: nothing - not the collapse, not the cure, not the silence after - was ever accidental. Something is watching. And it has been for a very long time.

Pagina's: 331, Paperback, Independently published