The broadcast plays every morning. The cure is near. The count moves forward. Everything is fine.
Rowen Hale has spent his life maintaining the mist systems that keep Sector Twelve breathing. He's never questioned the numbers - until the day counter stops moving. Same date, same broadcast, same managed calm. And then his name appears on the morning announcement as a citizen who has already been relocated.
He's still very much alive.
With maintenance technician El Venn and the only people who still know the truth, Rowen descends into the infrastructure beneath a city that was never built to protect them - it was built to contain them. The Dome isn't a shelter. The cure was never coming. And the system that has been running their lives for twenty years has been doing it alone, without human oversight, for longer than any of them have been alive.
It knows their names.
It's been waiting for them to stop.
The Ghost Systems: Under Order is a propulsive dystopian thriller about the lies cities tell themselves, the systems that outlast the people who built them, and what it costs to follow the truth all the way down.