Okeanos Returnal

Twelve years after a meteor strike erased the country of Elszia and remade the world's seas, the city of Marun stands stratified between the cloud-tops of its rich towers and the drowned slums beneath its harbor. ANI rings monitor every civilian thought. SNI — the closed-loop interface that could rewrite them — exists only in the sealed labs of factions that do not officially exist. Pell Phis is seventeen, broke, and the son of the man who's behind something. His father vanished the night the sky lit white. His mother is dying from a synthetic-nerve replacement that turned out to be a slow poison. The hardware at his temple, pressed into his hand at age five with a single sentence — keep it safe — has run warm for twelve years and done nothing he can name. Then his closest friend stops answering. A medical file with no address surfaces on his overlay. A woman he has never met begins watching him from the edge of the Sun Festival crowd. Down in Level Zero, where the blue fungus blocks the city's all-seeing ANI grid, three different factions are converging on a son they all want for different reasons — none of them his. A literary post-flood dystopia about engineering, surveillance, family silence, and the cost of being seen.