In a city where every step is owned, one man wants his back.
A grounded, near-future sci-fi action thriller - Blade Runner 2049 meets Sicario - written by Marco Alejandro Santiago and set in the red-light district of post-nuclear Tijuana in the year 2055.
In the aftermath of the nuclear exchange that ended the Second Mexican-American War, and with days left on the lease for his black-market cyber-legs, a double-amputee ex-Marine tears through the neon ruins of 2055 Tijuana in search of his missing wife - the engineer behind a shape-shifting superweapon - and must reach her before a fascist army uses her to remake mankind.
The world. 2055. The Second Mexican-American War ended when Mexico and the breakaway state of Texas traded tactical nukes. The nations of the world outlawed war, and war went underground where it always wanted to be - proxy armies, mercenaries, cartels. What they're all fighting over is SCAM: a machine that can rewrite the human body, and the master contract, locked in a quantum-engineered ledger called the Hyperblock, that decides who owns the result. In Tijuana's Zona Norte, bodies come with a subscription. Miss a payment and your arm stops being yours.
The deal. Alex Bravo, ex-Marine, works the door of a strip club from a wheelchair. He lost his legs in the war and his wife two years later - Jessica, a Tezca engineer, missing and presumed dead by everyone but him. Then a fixer named Gustavo offers him legs. Black-market, leased, a trial subscription counting down on his wrist. The price is a heist: steal the master key to every leased body on earth from the corporation that built it, with a crew of mercenaries who don't much like him and a dancer named Lana who knows Tezca better than she should.
The war. The heist goes wrong. A brother-in-arms dies, the key comes out dead, and the only person alive who can wake it is the engineer who wrote the lock - the wife Alex has been looking for. He's not the only one looking. Pakal Palen, the tech magnate who faked her death, needs her to finish a machine that can raise the dead. Alfred Blitz, the neo-fascist commander of a Texas-backed army, has read the master contract she created like scripture and worked out that whoever holds it owns every body on earth. When Alfred's men kidnap Jessica and drag her across the border, Alex has days left on his legs, a crew of wounded Marines in wheelchairs, and one friend who'll follow him anywhere: Kukulkan, the cartel general he grew up with.
Getting her back will cost him more than the legs. And what Jessica offers afterward is the only thing in this world that can't be bought, audited, or repossessed - a way to bring back what the war took, at a price only she can pay, and with an answer no one will ever be allowed to see.