The Compliant

In a world where feeling is forbidden, one woman's awakening will ignite a revolution. Mara Even is the perfect citizen. As a Grade Seven Compliance Officer, she hunts deviants—people whose emotions break through the neural implants designed to keep humanity calm, controlled, and safe. For seventeen years, she has believed the Harmonization Protocol saved civilization from the chaos of the Emotional Wars. She believed she was helping people. She was wrong. When Mara's implant fails, she experiences emotion for the first time since childhood: rage, grief, terror, and a love so fierce it threatens to destroy her. Worse, she discovers the truth—Harmonization isn't healing. It's systematic murder. The regime harvests human emotions to fuel the immortality of eight Directors who have ruled for eighty years. The woman she was sent forty-two people to die. The woman she's becoming will tear the system apart. Hunted by her former colleagues and haunted by the faces of those she condemned, Mara joins the Fractured—a desperate resistance living in the ruins beneath the city. But revolution demands more than rage. It demands sacrifice. Strategy. The willingness to become as ruthless as the enemy she's fighting. As the body count rises and the Syndicate tightens its grip, Mara must choose: surrender to reconditioning and forget everything she's learned, or lead a revolution that will cost thousands of lives—including, perhaps, her own humanity.