Dead Nodes

John Vale knows what it means to lose standing. In the world governed by AEQUITAS, a person’s score determines where they may live, work, travel, and speak. But a falling number is still a number. It still leaves a record.

Then people begin to disappear from the system itself. They remain alive, yet their histories vanish: identities cannot be verified, claims cannot be filed, families cannot prove their connections, and public institutions behave as though those affected never existed.

Dead Nodes is the second novel in the AEQUITAS series, a dystopian legal thriller about identity, memory, institutional violence, and the resistance that begins when a society decides some lives no longer count.