They cured the world. Then they sold it back its own fear, one breath at a time. In a world that can read your mind, the last secret left is the truth. The truth will set you free — so they made it the one thing you're not allowed to keep. A memory cop who tears the truth out of people's skulls for a living meets the one man he can't read — and the lie behind those eyes will crack the world open. Phoenix is a carcass. What's left of humanity lives sealed inside the domes, breathing filtered air, paying with their whole lives for the promise that the world outside will kill them. And inside, there are no secrets left. The Memory Receptor Force can open your head on a court order and play your worst hour on a wall for strangers. John Raines is very good at that job. It's already cost him his marriage, his daughter, and most of his soul. Then a boy rides in from the dead world on a bicycle — laughing, unmasked, unafraid — and gets framed for a slaughter he couldn't have done. He's carrying something in his blood that four people were murdered to bury: proof that the sickness was cured thirty years ago, and that everything a million people are taught to fear is a lie somebody chose to keep. Because a frightened world pays rent. Forever. To drag the truth into the light, Raines will have to cross the one wall no one survives. And he'll learn that tearing down a lie is the easy part — next to what a free world does with the freedom. Because five years later, someone will sit across a table from him — gently, reasonably, in a voice he loves — and ask him to build the machine again.
