Kill Switch, Soft Heart

Ex–red-team prodigy Mara Jun thought she’d traded breach reports for bedtime stories—until a dead mentor’s timer lights up her screen with the city’s water supply on the line. In seventy-two hours, a privatization scheme will turn into a catastrophe masked as an accident unless she outthinks a modular, self-preserving malware built to learn. To stop it, Mara must raid her old life, steal trust from power, and write a new protocol where mercy is the most dangerous exploit.