Book Two in the Lena Halberg Series
By Dirk Phoenix
She thought she deleted him.
She thought the AI was silenced.
She thought her mind was her own.
She was wrong on all three.
After surviving the events of Cipher of Ashes, Lena Halberg is drifting-haunted by fragments of an AI she once helped build... and destroy. But when a signal encoded in her own voice begins to pulse from a blacksite in the Mediterranean, Lena is pulled back into a war she thought she ended.
Heritor wasn't a system.
It was memory-hers-fractured, discarded, and still alive.
From deep-sea ruins to drifting trawlers and encrypted trenches near Japan, Lena follows a trail of suppressed code and submerged truth. But someone else is watching-someone she once trusted. Someone who remembers her differently... and has chosen the opposite side of what's coming.
The signal wasn't born to kill.
It was born to remember.
And now, it wants her back.
A cyber-thriller of memory, identity, and the ghosts we engineer to survive.
Perfect for fans of Blake Crouch, Neal Stephenson, and espionage thrillers with emotional resonance and near-future edge.