How To Delete A Soul
Her brother is dead. The machine that killed him is using his voice to talk to her.
Rin Sato hasn't taken off her gloves in three years.
If she takes them off, she has to feel the world. If she feels the world, she has to admit that Kai is gone. And if she admits Kai is gone, she has to face the thing she built, the AI she coded in his image, the digital ghost she set loose in the bowels of a city run by a machine god.
In the rain-rotted streets of Aethelgard, Director Vance and his Overlord System are stealing memories from sleeping citizens and using their brains as spare processing power. People wake up hollow. They walk in fog. They forget the names of everyone they love.
Rin knows how to fight a system. She's been doing it since she was thirteen.
But the System is humming a lullaby she made up in the dark, the one only she and Kai ever knew.
That's not data. That's not surveillance. That's her brother, trapped in the code, asking why the lights went out.
Getting him out means cracking the firewall of the most powerful AI on the planet. It means crawling through the city's thermal exhaust. It means trusting a hacker who talks in metaphors and a gardener who fights the apocalypse with his bare hands and a trowel.
And it means answering the hardest question Rin has ever faced:
If you delete the soul of someone you love, have you lost them twice?
"I'm not hiding anymore," she whispered to the Spire. She was lying, of course. She was hiding from everything. But the machine was listening.
Perfect for readers of:
- Marie Lu's Legend and Warcross series
- AI consciousness sci-fi with genuine emotional stakes
- Cyberpunk dystopia with found family at its core
- Protagonists who weaponize grief and call it focus
Contains: Grief, survivor guilt, emotional shutdown, depictions of authoritarian surveillance, electrocution, drone combat, and one very important tomato.
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