An elite body retriever discovers the executed resistance leader she is transporting across a locked-down city is still alive—and must smuggle him home before the corporate security force hunting them destroys both the man and the truth he carries.

SYNOPSIS:

Mara Voss returns the dead to their families. Precise, emotionally sealed, and trusted across conflict zones, she prefers corpses to survivors: the dead cannot panic or betray her position.

Her latest assignment is Adrian Kale, a legendary resistance leader supposedly executed by the authoritarian Vigil Group. But inside his sealed body bag, Mara discovers a pulse. Kale’s death was staged, and he carries evidence proving Vigil engineered the nation’s collapse for profit.

With every checkpoint alerted, Mara must move him through morgues, funeral convoys, tunnels, and the grieving crowds of the Old Quarter while teaching him to pass as dead. Their alliance fractures when she learns Kale sacrificed his own followers to preserve the resistance network. He wants to die as a martyr before he can be judged as a man.

When Vigil captures Kale and sends him to an industrial crematorium, Mara abandons her contract and returns for him. She turns the facility’s machinery against his captors and exposes its mass-disposal operation.

Before the cameras, Kale reveals Vigil’s crimes—but first confesses his own. Mara completes her final journey not by delivering a body, but by choosing to preserve a flawed human life.

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