Fifteen-year-old Akaela doesn't know what fear is. She was built this way. But in a world where survival is no longer of the fittest, being fearless can become a deadly curse. Proud and steeped in tradition, Akaela's people, the Mayake, are dying. While they carry implanted nanobots and sophisticated chips to compensate for their crippled and diseased bodies, these enhancements come at a price. Aging technology and a lack of resources make the Mayakes vulnerable to their enemies and on the brink of extinction. As the elders cling blindly to the past, the only hope Akaela and her 16-year-old brother Athel have to save their own people is to challenge the system or die trying.

A Mayake Chronicles Short Story Twenty years ago the Gaijins lost the battle against the deadliest and most infectious bacterium ever engineered. To save themselves, the few survivors retreated to complete isolation, surrendering their lives and all human interactions to computers and artificial intelligence. Now, two decades later, a sixteen-year-old girl eagerly awaits the New Queen’s ending of the mandatory quarantine, allowing the Gaijins to finally step out a of their forced segregation. Lilun longs to start a new life, away from the sterile prison of her virtual world and the control of her robotic mother. But what she doesn’t know is that the outside world has irreversibly changed …

Hidden beneath the ruins of Astraca, the legendary city destroyed by raging fires more than a century ago, hides the last sanctuary of the Mayake people—if only they can reach it. Hounded relentlessly by the Gaijins, the Mayakes are in a race against time as they search desperately for the entrance to Astraca’s fabled Underground City. Young Athel and his friends know the only way to enter the City is to solve the mystery of the engrams, bits of encoded memories passed from one generation to the next. What they don't know is that even if they elude the Gaijins' latest threats and succeed to escape, the Underground City has its own secrets to reveal. Secrets that could either save the Mayake people or make the Gaijins' work a lot easier.