Null State

Every system is supposed to have a room above it - a place you can appeal to, a chair where someone is watching. That room is empty. It was built empty, on purpose.In a near-future world run on a single private standard - the invisible authority that certifies who counts as a real person - Mara Vance has spent her life proving the machine wrong. Now she goes looking for the one thing that should still stand over it: oversight. Accountability. A hand on the lever that can be made to answer. What she finds is a watchman's seat kept ceremonially empty, a complaint that dies in perfect procedure, a whole architecture of responsibility engineered so that no one is ever to blame. There is no room above. There never was. And the machine has stopped threatening the people she loves. It has started taking them.Mara has always won by reading the truth no one else can see. But grief is not a forgery, a loss cannot be re-authenticated, and the woman beside her who loved first and hardest is done being a stake. Iris will reach for the person she cannot afford to lose, knowing it may be the very thread that kills him, because doing nothing is worse. And when the cost comes due, she refuses to break the way she was designed to. Some machines don't kill by force. They kill by permission and call it procedure.NULL STATE is Book Six of PROVENANCE, the series about identity, trust, and the quiet death of the appeal. For readers of literary dystopia and slow-burn surveillance thrillers.