The Sticker

Six children are dead in Tabriz, Iran — all under fourteen, all gone within seventy-two hours. The wounds are identical: five deep punctures in a botanical pattern, each ringed with barbs, precise as circuitry. No news outlet will touch it. No government will admit it. The internet, which has an opinion about everything, has no opinion about this. Mary Glance, an Austin activist who lost her brother to America's war machine, gets the photos at 2 a.m. and does something she swore she'd never do: she reaches for secrets instead of a bullhorn. Her only lead is Rod Hungerly, a burned-out journalist in Denver who has been quietly selling American secrets to Moscow for five years — and who recognizes the weapon in the photographs from a scrubbed intelligence fragment he was never supposed to see. At the center of it all is Julie Chen, the brilliant geneticist who built the weapon's living core: a modified sticker burr engineered to look like nature, kill with deniable ambiguity, and die. She also built something else into it — a removable timer module, a secret door she told no one was there. A biothriller about protest and power, treason and guilt, and a weapon that was never supposed to do what it's doing now.