In Halberion—a sealed, self-governed city built upward instead of outward—power is measured in floors. Below Floor Twenty, you’re a worker. Below Thirty, you’re noise. Above Forty, you’re untouchable. Three days before she plunges from the 47th floor of the Vesper Tower, political analyst Iris Thorne sends a message to someone who has every reason to ignore her. That someone is Calem Rhys—a former behavioral-linguistics engineer who helped design Halberion’s cognitive compliance systems before abandoning the project and vanishing from public life. Iris’s message contains a single encrypted file and a warning: “If anything happens to me, open this. And don’t trust the elevators.” Hours later, Iris is declared a suicide. The statement is clean. Too clean. Detective Arielle Soren, assigned to the case she wasn’t supposed to touch, finds the official reports already signed before she even receives them. Evidence disappears from secure servers. Keycard logs reset themselves. And the witnesses who lived on the same floor as Iris refuse to say what they heard—or what they saw being carried out at 2:14 a.m. When Calem decrypts Iris’s final file, fragments emerge: voices flattened into monotone, forced “adjustment sessions,” and a clinical term repeated with unnerving calm— “SYNDROME: Phase Forty.” Victims who tried to leave the program have been falling, vanishing, or “silently recuperating” in private facilities owned by the same conglomerate that built every tower above Floor Forty. Someone is manufacturing loyalty. Someone is editing personalities. And someone is watching Calem and Arielle from a height where the city’s laws don’t reach. Because once you step onto the fortieth floor, Halberion stops being a city. It becomes a system. And systems do not tolerate errors.