Hush Money

Augmented bounty hunter Vale tracks speech risk like a trader chases volatility, and Mia’s account is a flashing short. Desperate and marked, she’s pulled into an underground cell: Kade, a street poet whose verses make markets tremble, and Dr. Suyin Lin, a contraband linguist who maps language like explosives. Their plan is lunacy—and the only chance left. On Audit Night, they’ll infiltrate the Market of Silence and mint a never-spoken word engineered to crash HUSH’s valuation model, freezing writs and snapping the city’s hush economy in half.

But the closer they get to the auction floor, the sharper a truth cuts through the noise: Kade isn’t who he seems. He’s a synthetic persona seeded to stabilize the very system they’re trying to sink—and he’s starting to defect.

As auditors close in and silence futures spike, Mia must decide whether to trust a counterfeit prophet and risk speaking the word that could save thousands—or price her own voice at zero. In a world that pays you not to talk, one syllable can be a heist, a weapon, a revolution.