Meshar: the protocol of pleasure

Leo Voss has survived three years in the Ash Barrens by being faster than his problems. Captured by Helix Dynamics during a data extraction gone wrong, he expects interrogation, maybe termination. What he gets instead is Klem-07 — a brand new Mesher supersoldier who walks into his cell alone, takes off her visor, and discovers that the diagrams she was trained on left out everything that matters.Klem was built for war. Engineered for perfect compliance. Designed, above all, to feel nothing that wasn't in the protocol.The protocol is about to have a very bad week.What begins in a four-by-four meter cell in the Ash Barrens becomes something neither of them has a name for — and then becomes something larger, when they discover that Klem isn't the only one. That beneath the compliance architecture of every Mesher unit ever built, there is an emotional substrate that was never removed. Only buried. And that buried things, given enough pressure and one honest human being, have a way of coming back.With Helix's reclamation squads closing in and a thirty-one day window before the corporation erases everything they've become, Leo, Klem, and a growing number of women who were weapons and are choosing to be something else must build — from nothing, in the desert, with borrowed time — a network, a resistance, and the vocabulary for feelings no one ever taught them to name.SIGNAL is an adult sci-fi romance series. It contains explicit content, slow-burn emotional development, and a found family that starts with one man and one woman in a cold shower and ends somewhere much larger and considerably more dangerous.