22 parts Complete MatureIn the rain-slicked, neon-drenched labyrinth of the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, some ghosts don't rattle chains-they haunt the wires. They call him Mako. To the city's criminal underworld, he is a digital phantom, a legendary hacker capable of crashing cranes and emptying bank accounts with a keystroke. The truth is far more strange, and far more dangerous.
Mako is a man who died and was reborn as something new: a technopath. His consciousness is a living network protocol, his senses a symphony of data streams and electrical currents. He is a ghost in the machine, a predator who can control any technology he can touch, a power he uses for a single, obsessive purpose: to dismantle the empire of the corrupt official who created him and left him for dead.
But Mako's quiet, methodical war for revenge is thrown into chaos when he discovers he is not the only phantom in Olongapo. He witnesses the brutal efficiency of a mysterious old watchmaker and the raw, elemental power of a warrior king from the mountains. He realizes his personal vendetta is just one small piece of a much larger, secret war.
When his hunt leads him to a horrifying truth about human trafficking and a new generation of stolen weaponry, Mako is forced to make a choice: remain a ghost in the wires, a cold, logical predator seeking vengeance, or embrace the last vestiges of his stolen humanity to become a protector. To save the innocent, the machine must decide if he is still a man, and the ghost must finally choose a side in a war that will define the soul of the city.
[Biyayaverse Book 3]