Neon Strays
In a city of forty million people, the smallest problems are the ones nobody else will solve.
Juno Delacroix is a pet detective. She works alone from a four-hundred-square-foot office the building's AI classifies as storage, armed with nothing but a sticker-covered drone named Gerald and a stubbornness the city hasn't managed to wear down. When your cat goes missing on the sixty-eighth floor or your hamster escapes into the ventilation system, Juno is the one you call.
But lately, the cases aren't adding up. A calico found seven floors above her home, resting in a vent that's mysteriously warmer than it should be. A golden retriever who memorized an elevator route to a floor he's never been to. A parrot repeating an address that doesn't exist.
Something in the city's infrastructure is guiding animals upward - through hidden corridors of warmth threaded into the ventilation system, built with an engineer's precision over thirty years. And the trail leads to a rooftop garden that shouldn't exist, an old woman who's been tending it alone, and a community that doesn't know it needs saving yet.
Along the way, Juno collects the family she never planned: a gentle veterinarian who says we without thinking, a sixteen-year-old hacker living in a decommissioned server room, and a ramen shop owner who has been quietly feeding the neighbourhood's soul for twenty-two years. Together, they have five days to save sixty animals and the woman who rescued them.
Neon Strays is a cozy cyberpunk mystery about found family, warm ramen, and the radical act of caring about things the world says are too small to matter.
Perfect for readers of Becky Chambers, Travis Baldree, and anyone who ever talked to a pet like it could understand them.
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