The Last Signal

The city runs on one company's grid. One small radio station is about to switch it off. Every night at midnight, Riley Voss sits in a sagging shed at the edge of town and broadcasts Radio Nowhere on 540 AM. It's a pirate station: a mast welded from scrap, a handful of loyal listeners, and a crew of misfits. Milo keeps the gear alive. Eddie knows every back road. Bitwise and KayVee can talk to any machine in the city. And there's Moth, the watchdog AI Riley built to keep the station hidden. Moth is careful and curious, and it's honest to a fault. Moth won't lie to her, even when the truth is the last thing she wants to hear. Then Moth picks up something buried in the noise. GridTech, the corporation that powers every home, hospital and streetlight in the city, is planning something it can't afford to have anyone find out about. Its CEO, Hale, has the lawyers, the security teams and the vans on the bridge road to keep it quiet. Riley has a shed, a transmitter, and a voice that a few thousand people trust at midnight. Soon the grid starts to flicker and Radio Nowhere becomes the only thing still on the air. Riley has to decide what she's willing to risk, and whether a machine that was built to hide her can help her stop hiding for good. The Last Signal is a fast, warm-hearted techno-thriller about pirate radio, found family, and an AI that turns out to be the best partner a person could ask for. It's for readers who love underdogs taking on giants, and who believe the future can still be built by people and machines working together. Because sometimes the only way to be heard is to say your name out loud.