Resonance Protocol

Seventeen stories below the surface of a flooded colony, salvage diver Cassia Venn has learned to keep her regulator steady, her questions buried, and her head down. Then she pulls a transmission from the drowned sublevel of Old Kowloon-9 that corporate overseers have spent decades hunting , a recorded voice, a fragment of consciousness, and a frequency the powerful will kill to contain. The voice belongs to Mira Venn: a researcher erased from every official record, whose broken signal reaches Cassia through static, memory, vision, and song. Mira's resonance pattern is more than data , it is a key to what the corporation calls the Pattern, an intelligence that could change the boundaries between human and machine. Now Cassia is being pulled into a conspiracy that spans the flooded depths and the polished towers above, where Director Harlan Vance will burn the colony down to keep the Pattern buried, and where her colleague Rhea Okonkwo has already been taken captive. With the help of Yorin Castellan, Dezmond Pike, and the rogue Dr. Sable Mwangi, Cassia must piece together Mira's scattered message before Vance silences every frequency. But every layer she decodes pulls her closer to a resonance that does not distinguish between signal and soul. To save Rhea, Cassia may have to do the one thing the protocol forbids , and follow the ghost in the static all the way home.