The Chrome Widow

Elias "Glass" Thorne used to be a cop. Now, he's just a man with a glitchy cybernetic eye and a mounting debt to the kind of people who collect in blood. When Sarah Vane walks into his office, she isn't just looking for a private investigator; she's looking for a miracle. Her husband, Arthur, is dead—the latest victim of a "Maglev Massacre" attributed to a sudden, violent bout of brain-burn. The official report is clean, but Sarah's story isn't: Arthur was a "Natural," a man who never touched a piece of chrome in his life. A man with no hardware shouldn't be able to short-circuit. Armed with nothing but a suspicious charity receipt and a wary tip from his old partner, Elias follows a trail of breadcrumbs from the neon-soaked gutters of the slums to the sterile, ivory towers of Aether-Biotech. Along the way, he'll have to dodge debt collectors, navigate the shifting loyalties of the street, and rely on a ghost from his past—a street kid who sees the things the city tries to hide. As the "Chrome Widow's" secrets unravel, Elias discovers a conspiracy involving black-market wetware that goes deeper than a corporate ledger. In a world where memories can be rewritten and souls can be digitized, Elias is about to learn that some secrets are buried for a reason—and the cost of digging them up might be his last remaining shred of humanity.