Saint Barbara
Barb Anders built KeyLink out of the wreckage of her own past: an app, a string of coding workshops, and a refusal to let a broken system have the last word on anyone living unhoused on Oakland's streets. Then the bank balance drops to fifty-eight days of runway. Staff drift. Clients scatter. The funders who once celebrated her stop returning calls.
Then the offer arrives. Five million dollars, unrestricted, from Andrew Undershaft, the father Barb fled years ago and the architect of an empire that profits from war. The money would let her do what she's only let herself imagine: a pilot to end homelessness with permanent housing and real care. The cost is her name beside a company that builds the very things she's spent two decades opposing.
There's an older story beneath this one. Saint Barbara was a girl locked in a tower by her father and killed by his hand. Today she is remembered as the patron saint of artillerymen, and of anyone who works with fire and explosives. Her father's trade, not hers.
As the press circles, allies fracture, and the protests build, Barb faces the question she has spent her life avoiding: can a broken system be changed from the inside, or does it simply absorb whoever walks through the door?
A contemporary reimagining of George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara.
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