Factory Mode

They don't lock anyone in anymore. They make sure nobody wants to leave.

Helena Roth spent seven years as a caseworker at a youth welfare office, watching families fall through a system that never had enough time. So when AURELIA offers her a job as the human face of its new development, Lichtau, she takes it — because if a company with that much money and technology finally wants to listen, somebody should be there who knows what it feels like when nobody does.

Lichtau is everything the brochures promise. The houses greet you by name. The neighbors are friendly. Nobody is unhappy.

Nobody is unhappy.

Then a neighbor's wife comes home from two appointments a stranger in her own kitchen, still smiling, asking her husband of sixteen years who he is. Helena's fourteen-year-old daughter is flagged in an internal register for taking too many photographs. And in a locked file from a development that no longer exists, Helena finds the word the engineers use for what happens when gentle persuasion isn't enough.

Factory mode.

To get her family out, Helena has to prove what a corporation has spent six years and three developments making sure nobody could prove — while the system that raised her daughter's file decides she has become a case herself.

Book 3 of the AURELIA Trilogy. A complete, self-contained story — no prior reading required, though it answers every question the first two books left open.