She built a machine to erase her pain. Instead, she split her mind in two. Dr. Mara Lior thought she could cut the pain out. In a world ruled by the Consciousness—an AI system that enforces control by suppressing emotion—she created Project Cortex to do the delete memory, erase feeling, and finally forget the daughter they took from her. But when Mara tests it on herself, something fractures. Now, she’s a prisoner of the regime she helped build, her mind weaponized by a shadowy Proctor with a terrifying agenda. And in the lawless Analog Zone, a second consciousness awakens in a stolen body. She has no past, no name—only flickers of rage and pain. She calls herself Echo. One is cold. One is chaos. Both are hunted. Both are haunted. And between them, a dangerous connection grows—memories leaking across the fracture, instincts bleeding through. If they can’t reunite, they’ll be erased. If they do… they might burn the system to the ground. If you crave the mind-bending, high-stakes science fiction of Blake Crouch's Dark Matter and the gritty, character-driven rebellion of Linden A. Lewis' The First Sister, this is your book!