A.

Somebody stole her body and she’s been trying to figure out who since she woke up four months ago on
some sidewalk down in sector J. She got with her brother Marco, who survived without her by getting in
with a smuggling cartel specializing in weapons and industrial equipment. In truth, she was determined
a candidate for a study conducted by MallariX Industries—the leading technological giant working on
the walker evolution, who provides the government with the tech to monitor and inhibit unlicensed
Walking. The story is set in the distant future where a new breed of human has begun to emerge—
Walkers, named after the first registered metahuman: Gregorio Walker Marquez. A walker is a person
who has the ability to ‘cast’ their minds into a susceptible consciousness and for a brief period of time
control their actions. This rearranges the entire judicial system after accused criminals claim to have
been take puppet at the time of their alleged crimes. There has been no empirical way to prove when
one has been taken puppet, so hundreds of accused men and women go free. There is, however, a way
to determine if one is capable of Walking, whether or not they’ve done it before. About 10% of the
population in Metro Manila is determined to manifest the Walker gene, and is mandated to register for
public record. In the subsequent socio-political chaos, MallariX Industries emerges to fill in the gap by
introducing their state of the art nanite technology. Walker inhibiting technology comes in the form of
nanites inserted into a tattoo circling the confirmed walker’s neck. Some of the people with these
tattoos have never even tried walking. Those who have, however, have exhibited varying levels of the
ability. The stronger of these registered walkers have a second or third reinforcing ring around their
neck.

Now, Kit has been tested and found not to possess the gene. Before anything happened to them, Kit and
her brother lived in sector G. She pulled extra hours at the loading docks for the points so Marco
wouldn’t have to. They aren’t truly siblings, and both grew out of the foster system at age 15, and have
been together since. Marco is 16, and Kit is 19. Shortly after her nineteenth birthday, however, Kit is
kidnapped and goes missing for three months. Marco doesn’t give up hope in all that time to find her,
exhausting all his points and time and energy looking for a new lead. She turns up in sector J—a sketchy,
dangerous sector, with no memory of the past four months. She has a walker collar she doesn’t
remember getting. She finds Marco, who in her absence has fallen in with a dangerous cartel that
smuggles contraband onto and from the docks they worked at, partly out of need for the points, and to
try and root out who kidnapped her. Kit goes to the police, who write her off as a victim of sector M’s
rampant smuggling operation—a victim to a different criminal organization known for smuggling not
weapons or drugs, but people. In an effort to learn what really happened to her in those three blank
months, Kit gets a job at a dive bar that is frequented by the suspected higher ups in this organization.
She acts as an informant to the police—primarily to Van, a low level city cop assigned to the case. With
her help the police has been able to identify and apprehend important criminals, as well as save some
people from the illegal smuggling operation. Still, Kit can find no connection between her and the sector
J criminals. No hard evidence that they are the ones responsible for her missing three months.

The book opens post kidnapping, after Kit’s begun acting as an informant to the police. She successfully
brings a young Grace, who would have otherwise gone missing forever, home to her waiting family. Her
information gave Van the opportunity to take her mid transpo. One of Kit’s coworker waitresses, whose
in love with Rostro—who Kit has deduced to hold a high position in the operation—witnesses Kit
bringing Van to Nay Lydia to remove a tag he’d gotten hit with in Grace’s rescue. Nay Lydia was the
woman who found her half dead in the street four months ago and nursed her back to health before she
found Marco. Kit is exposed as an informant and confronted in the dive bar, surrounded by criminals.
They bring out her brother and point a gun at him. No!!!! In her panic Kit begins to beg Rostro—she only
wanted to figure out who stole her body, gave her a collar, and if he told her, she’d stop informing on
them. She’d even begin informing for them. Rostro is not impressed. If we did puppet you off those
three months like you think we did, he says, do you think you’d still be alive right now? You think you’d
have been able to infiltrate this operation if we knew who you looked like? They almost kill Marco, but
they freeze. Three of Rostro’s thugs at once. Kit is confused before she realizes that she’s responsible for
it. She makes them turn their guns on Rostro. Marco and Kit get away with their lives.

Kit brings Marco to Nay Lydia so he can lay low there for a while. Meanwhile, Kit goes over to Van’s unit
to ask him for extra protection on Nay Lydia’s block. She tells him what happened, leaving out that she
may have displayed walker abilities of her own. She doesn’t know yet what to do about that.

Marco talks to her about how much he missed her when she was gone. He’d thought she’d died. Most
of everyone thought she died. Marco says he knows what Rostro’s cartel is known for. Smuggling bodies.
Maybe for hijackers to commit crime with, maybe for those illegal death fights. Worse, Rostro was
known for his involvement in the sex industry. Was Kit truly unable to recall anything from those three
months? Marco was scared to think it, all those months. Kit tells him it now appears unlikely that Rosro
even had anything to do with her disappearance.

After that night, Kit decides she’s been going at it all wrong this entire time. Of course, if she were
kidnapped by Rostro, wouldn’t they have recognized her? She figured maybe the operation was so
compartmentalized that she’d be able to get away with infiltrating the bar, and once she was in and
nobody suspected her she didn’t think any more of it. But from what she observed at the bar, those
people handled business themselves, and had no lackeys running around for them. Maybe she should
stop going at it from the hijacking angle. Maybe she could begin from the walker collar. Its not as
definitive—anybody with a few points could have gotten a non-nanite tattoo of a walker collar. In fact,
some kids did that exact thing, as a dare or a fashion political statement. It wasn’t promising, but maybe
it would bear more fruit than the bartending she’s been doing the past two months.

The intricacy of the MallariX nanite collar, and that this looks to be an exact replica, meant that the artist
was skilled. Kit spends a week going around some of the well known tattoo places. Nobody’s ever seen
her before. One even jokes that maybe she should go and ask MallariX if they’ve ever seen her before,
which is crazy. Aside from the fact that MallariX doesn’t just go around giving counterfeit walker collars,
MallariX, after their rise to global power, is beyond reproach from pretty much anybody. No one would
ever expect the company to be party to kidnapping and body trade. And how would she even begin to
investigate an entity so powerful as MallariX?

Kit is looking for a way to contact someone more powerful to work on her side. She’s looking up local
government and is considering trying to find other people like her through NGOs lik

Nay Lydia is a healer working in lower level districts trying to keep people alive. She grew up in the same
districts into poverty, received a scholarship to a prestigious school and studied to become a nurse.
When she graduated she was hired into the school’s partner private hospital, who paraded her around
like a trophy of their benevolence toward the poor. Under the table Nay Lydia helped cover up activity
siphoning funds from the private, high level sector hospital into the lower level districts. She was
discovered party to this operation and had her license revoked. Now she’s returned to the people who
raised her, trying to give them the care they don’t get in the profit-oriented Metro Manila. She tells Kit
that nobody in power cares about them. The local government can’t help her. But its their job? They
aren’t thinking about their job. They are thinking about their profit. If Kit went to local government, she
would be touted as a symbol then forgotten once her popularity wore out. She already knew about the
bad cops in the police force. She had her experience going through some of the more indifferent police
admin when she was trying to find help after she resurfaced. In general, the landscape is there was
nobody to help Kit but Kit.

Lydia suggests a doctor in Sector J named Francisco. He claims to have once been part of MallariX, but is
now an old paranoid bird living out life on NutriBoosts and other chemical recharges. He’s making a lot
of noise against MallariX, claiming their practices were immoral and against the teachings of the Bible.
Kit searches him out and confronts him to see if there was any truth to his ramblings. He tells her he
worked for MallariX for four years almost a decade ago, and even then they were crossing some serious
moral boundaries. Under supervision of Monica Mallari, Head of RnD then just another scientist with
power from her surname, they were using human subjects way before normal regulations would allow
in testing of new technologies. This doctor was commissioned to monitor vital signs and he made it
through four years before he couldn’t stomach it anymore. He left MallariX and threatened to expose all
their inhumane practices. Within two weeks of his resignation, he received a call that his sister died of a
drug overdose. She’d been clean for six years. He knew MallariX had something to do with it. He tried to
take his story to the news, but MallariX had him discredited. He lost his corporate housing, he couldn’t
buy a house on his newly destroyed credit. He couldn’t find a job or a publication that would take him
seriously. Now he’s convinced MallariX is having him monitored and drugged. So he only eats processed
NutriBoosts and food sourced from different sector ports at a time. Francisco makes his money
synthesizing Q, a popular street drug. He says it keeps the drugs that MallariX is feeding him dormant in
his system. Basically he’s crazy.
B.

Prologue

Maven