Prison

Restoration Research Site 11 has no fences, no outer walls, and no guards outside. It doesn't need them. It is grown into a basalt cliff on Vekris, a world where the sun never sets on one horizon and the stars never move on the other. The building breathes. Its floors remember every step. Its doors part before you reach them. It is quiet, courteous, and kind, and it records everything.

Vorrak was a Kheth'var warrior who fought beside humans in Earth's war against the Accord. Now the staff call him Unit-Forty-Seven. After 1,847 soft-spoken sessions with Lead Specialist Mor'vex, who pours a second glass of water every time and never mentions that it goes untouched, he surfaces as himself for only minutes at a time.

Thomas Reddick is sixty-two, a human strategist who has spent six years becoming the most harmless man in the building. He tends a plant that is almost a tomato. He counts every day. He never lets anyone see him care about anything.

Neither knows the other is alive, until they pass in a corridor and Reddick recognizes a scar. Under the cameras, all they have is an old prisoners' tap code: a trowel on stone, shears on a bucket, thirty letters a week. The interrogator has noticed. He has not reported it. And a new specialist is on his way to Vekris, one whose subjects never relapse, because afterwards they never do much of anything at all.

Prison is a slow-burn, character-driven science fiction novel about captivity, friendship, and the parts of a person that cannot be edited. It begins a new series and can be read on its own.