If the world hadn’t already ended, Warren Smith would’ve become a serial killer. He was built for it cold, precise, methodical. Not driven by rage or trauma, but by a hunger for control. A creature of discipline and detachment. In the old world, he would’ve been studied. Hunted. Locked away. But the old world is long gone. Centuries ago, something broke, everything broke. Civilization collapsed under its own weight, swallowed by unchecked ambition, mass failure, and rot. The cities fell. The satellites died. People learned to fear silence because silence meant they’d been forgotten. And then, hundreds of years later, came the System. Sold as a cure. Marketed as salvation. A new architecture to stitch the ruins back together. Embedded in human minds through chips and fragments, it offered power, skills, survival. It promised to lift the desperate into something more than just broken survivors.

In the bleak future of West Angel City, Vanity Rose is having a great time. She has a loving robot caretaker, a fake elf for a sister, and she roams the walls of West Angel's endless skyscrapers every night, thanks to her precious gravity shoes. What Vanity doesn't have are money and adventure, but she has a plan to get both. She's going to walk the dark side, joining the thieves, and mercenaries who get paid to do all the little jobs that make a corrupt city go around. She'll only have to deal with killer robots, vengeance-crazed and not very bright computer programs, cyborg vampires, telepathic capybaras, mean girl mech pilots, and have every homemade weapon in the city pointed at her.