Project 29: The World Behind the Mask

The government gave Edward back his life. They just forgot to include the three hours where he saw something he wasn't supposed to.

A student with no powers and no training. Edward was just a kid from outside the dome whose family broke themselves to buy him a future inside. Then a scavenging side job put him in the wrong place at exactly the wrong time.

Now there's a bounty on his head that would make a veteran soldier retire. The only reason he’s still breathing is a man the government numbered Project 29, a survivor who calls himself Drago. The classified truth they both carry is simple: the world isn't being saved. It never was. The program was never about fixing the air. It was about building humans who don't need clean air to survive.

Thousands of test subjects died learning that. Thirty-seven didn't.

Edward is outside the dome now, back in the one place his family spent everything to save him from. He’s caught between mafia factions running the wasteland, corporate money funding the chaos, and a government that would rather erase a student than answer for what it built.

He has no powers. Just a brain, a debt he owes his family, and the kind of ordinary face that nobody expects to still be standing when the smoke clears.

Some people are weapons. Edward is something the powerful find harder to deal with: a witness who refuses to disappear.