The Exodus
The year the brain drain became a migration. Not a single decision — a hundred thousand of them, made one engineer at a time, until the country that built the machines couldn't keep the people who understood them.
Smoke Over Caracas
Drew hears the Caracas Massacre through the NSAS — every heartbeat, every gunshot, every body hitting the ground. His country did this. He stops building roads and starts building weapons.
Romans
Drew's first encounter with Synter's neural-controlled soldiers. They move wrong. The enemy is a victim.
The Burn South
40,000 Americans walk into Baja. They call it a festival. DHS calls it mass defection. For the ones who can't leave, it's the worst weekend of their lives.
The Unburned
A Roman broke Synter's control by himself, then kept the implant and walked out of the deprogramming queue before anyone assessed him. A Tier 3 without consent, without Integration, without a partner — the one-person argument that augmentation never needed the centaur.
Orders
A US Army medic in occupied Venezuela has been patching up the contractors for a year without being allowed to ask what they are. One night the rules and the wound leave her no choice, and she finds the implant behind the ear. This is where the whistleblower started — eight years into an occupation an empire could no longer staff with its own.
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