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Isla Marsh escaped Saltmere with her life, stolen data, and a body that is slowly consuming itself. The parasitic organisms threading through her nervous system were designed to be maintained by the programme that created them. Without it, she is dying – and the ocean she was engineered to crave is the only thing that quiets the screaming in her blood.
But Blackwood Marine isn’t waiting for biology to finish what they started.
A corporate manhunt is closing in. Her photograph is in every newspaper. Her mother is being watched, threatened, offered money to betray her. And somewhere inside Saltmere’s walls, a former ally has been enhanced and reshaped into something cold and patient and hunting – tracking Isla through the psychic bond that connects them, waiting for the moment her defences slip.
She can’t run forever. So she stops running.
Hidden in the back streets of Glasgow, Isla finds an underground resistance network that has been fighting Blackwood Marine for years – a fugitive scientist who survived the programme himself and knows how to stabilise what it did to her, an investigative journalist building a case that could bring the corporation to its knees, and allies she never expected in the places she least trusts.
But stabilisation comes with a price. The same compound that keeps her alive sharpens the bond – and sharpens it in both directions. Every move she makes, every plan she builds, risks exposure to the predator circling at the edge of her mind.
The gala at Blackwater Hall is their one chance.
One night. One infiltration. Thirty years of evidence locked in a server buried beneath the institution that created it. If Isla can get inside, she can extract the proof that will expose everything – the experiments, the missing students, the sedated subjects kept alive in pharmaceutical prisons for years.
If she fails, Blackwood Marine will bury the truth and everyone who tried to dig it up.
And in the deepest partition of that server lies something worse than proof of past crimes – the coordinates of a facility in the Arctic where the programme’s architects are building something that makes Saltmere look like a rehearsal.