“In a city that erases people with a transposed digit, one investigator is hired to find a woman who was never meant to be found.”
Duke Savage is a former investigative journalist turned private investigator operating out of a cramped office above a pawnshop in Los Angeles. When an encrypted message warns him that a young woman is running out of time, he discovers Sarah Chu has been systematically erased from the administrative systems that govern modern life.
FILE 001 · DUKE SAVAGE
Twenty-seven drafts. A mechanism that learns to hide.
Duke Savage is a former investigative journalist turned private investigator operating out of a cramped office above a pawnshop in Los Angeles. Estranged from his daughter Julie and struggling to stay ahead of the addictions and regrets accumulated across decades, Duke survives by taking the cases nobody else wants. When an encrypted message warns that a young woman is running out of time, he begins searching for Sarah Chu, a twenty-seven-year-old data analyst who appears to have vanished without explanation.
What he discovers is more disturbing than a disappearance: Sarah has been systematically erased from the administrative systems that govern modern life -- employment records, housing data, medical access, financial history -- transformed from a living person into what the system classifies as an administrative variance. The trail leads to Victoria Cross, a former insider exposing a powerful network known as the Babylon Circuit, which has developed a method for quietly displacing vulnerable people from valuable property corridors while remaining entirely within the law.
The origin of everything that follows. The lamp that never goes out.
The house was a rental on Fontenelle Boulevard. Two bedrooms, a yard that had given up, and the same furnace that ran three months behind the weather.
The man inside the house had a daughter. Eight years old. She slept in the back bedroom with a lamp on.
The men left. The man on the floor of his hallway got up. He would require ongoing management for the next twenty-five years.
The rest of the prologue lives in the manuscript — join the dispatch to read it.
Keep readingA working dossier on the investigator at the center of the trilogy. Compiled from case files, bar napkins, and the occasional 3 a.m. phone call.
A science-fantasy novel of ruin, kinship, and the cost of deciding for the people you love.
