She erases people for a living. Now she's become one of them.

The Republic controls everything. What you breathe. What you earn. Whether your name stays on the ledger - or gets scrubbed into silence.

Maren Hallon is a Ministry analyst in the drowned cities beneath the surface. Every shift, she sits at her console in the Central Monitoring Spire and scrubs Echoes from the sonar: drifters, dissidents, the uncounted - people the Republic has decided should not exist. One keystroke per life. Nine hours a day. She is very good at it.

She doesn't ask what happens to them. She can't afford to. Her father's rebreather won't pay for itself, and in the Republic, the only thing compliance costs you is your conscience.

Maren has been making that bargain for six years. She knows the weight of it. She has learned to carry it the way you carry something you have decided not to look at directly: by feel, in the dark, without letting your fingers close around the shape of it.

When she finally breaks - choosing one life over the system that employs her - she becomes the thing she's spent years deleting. A name the Ministry wants off the ledger. A problem to be solved.

Now she's running.

Through the cold dark of the trench sectors, with her critically ill father barely on his feet and Kaelen at her side - a wanted man with a wounded hand and secrets she doesn't have time to unpick. Behind them, Ministry enforcers armed with the same tools Maren once used: the sonar, the ledger, the precise and practised art of making people vanish. Ahead, a colony the Republic insists doesn't exist. A settlement beyond the reach of the ledger, where Echoes live openly and the names stay written and the air rises free from the water.

If it's real.

If they can reach it alive.

If Maren can outrun people who were trained exactly the same way she was.

The hardest part isn't the trench. It isn't the enforcers, or the failing equipment, or the question of whether she trusts Kaelen enough to let him close. It's that Maren knows exactly how the Ministry thinks - because she spent years thinking like them. She knows how the searches run, how signals get weighted, how quickly a person can be reduced to a flatline on someone else's screen. If she were sitting at the console right now, watching her own ping bloom in the queue, she knows exactly what she would do.

She'd press the key without hesitating.

She has spent years being very good at making people disappear.

She's about to find out how hard it is to stay visible.

Abyss: Shorelight Book One - a fast-paced underwater dystopian thriller for fans of The Hunger Games, Legend, and Scythe.

Readers can expect: A morally complex female protagonist navigating impossible choices A tense slow-burn romance built on mutual survival Vivid, immersive underwater world-building High-stakes action from the first page Book One of the Shorelight series