Fade: Book Two Of The Metro Cycle

Twenty years ago, Shiro Bloom made headlines with The Bloom Bust, helping to bring down a cadre of power-elites, political figureheads, and corporate black programs known as The Vertical Group, defining his career and his life from that point forward. The Bust would inspire an entire generation to take up the cause of the Social: using the power of connection and truth to make their corners of the world a better place. Shiro and Gemma Price-Bloom spent years digging into the dirty secrets of Vertical and anyone tied to it. And then, without warning, they disappeared. Dead or simply hiding out in the system, no one knows.

Today, Deni Kim-Barnes lives that Social life: by day a doting older sister to her genius younger brother, Sun, by night a headliner at Extrasolar, the most Up-Town of San Francisco’s Up-Town nightclubs. Deni (never Denise) uses her influence and reach to talk to the lonely hearts, the night-owls, the castaways looking for a little piece of connection – something she has been denying herself since the death of her parents. Her goal is simple and absolute: keep food on the table and a roof over Sun’s head.

But when Sun’s favorite game, FADE, turns out not to be what she thought it was, and the enigmatic Xian Lin reaches out to her to warn her about FADE’s creator, Deni’s concern turns to fear as she falls into a world of corporate espionage, kidnapping, and assassination. Who is behind the world of FADE? What does he want with Sun? And what does any of this have to do with her mother’s long-forgotten research?