Rusthound

The Veiled Concordat doesn't call it slavery.
It calls it employment.

Inside the V.C.'s sovereign corporate territories, biological hierarchies determine who labors and who profits. Who gets collared and who holds the rifle.

Dissent is disease.
Pharmaceutical compliance?
Probable.

The company towns that grind down Khimera into industrial output have been operating for so long that the civilians outside the fences have stopped asking questions, so long as the shipments keep coming.

Caelum, a chemically arrested Khanid, is trapped inside a body he should've grown out of ten years ago. He should've been an engineer, but after an accident that wasn't his fault the Concordat needed someone to blame. He's got one year left on his sentence, a rusted out convertible that he talks to, and two younger siblings he's been raising in place of parents that checked out long ago.

Rowan is a strikebreaker assigned to keep people like Caelum in line. A shareholder's makeshift son who was never given a choice about what the uniform cost. Reforged by a father who needed an heir more than a daughter, she carries rank built on obedience, a body reshaped without consent, and a growing certainty that every order followed has been a crime committed.

Rook doesn't work for the Concordat. Self identified double agent, chaos engine, and resistance network informant. He doesn't take jobs for money. He does it because he's constitutionally incapable of leaving a bad situation alone. This one comes with a man in the Neotenic Rebound Clinic, and a woman preparing for an arranged marriage two hundred miles away.