by Luc Harrow
Everyone on Anahuac has a chip. Everyone except Mateo. Anahuac Island is the most connected city on Earth — a capital built from scratch in the Gulf of Mexico, where two hundred thousand people run their lives through chips embedded at registration and a sensor network that sees everything. It is also, in seventy-two hours, the site of the most important ceremony in the hemisphere's history: the coronation of a new Emperor. Mateo Vega is seventeen, unchipped, and the only person who knows the island's tunnels from the inside — a side effect of growing up as his father's shadow on six years of construction sites. He isn't supposed to be in Sector Nine at midnight. He definitely isn't supposed to find a body. The girl who found it first isn't supposed to be there either. Serafina Cross has been sneaking out of her imperial security detail every night for three weeks, investigating something she can't report through official channels because she doesn't know which official channels she can trust. Her father is the Emperor-designate. The body changes everything she thought she knew. What they find in the tunnels beneath the coronation stage — forty-three meters of unauthorized conduit, a mapped conspiracy, and a name that shouldn't be there — sets a clock running that none of them can stop through the right channels. Not with a leak inside the operation. Not with seventy-two hours left. Not without going back underground. The empire was built on this island. Something is about to prove it shouldn't have been.
