Daemon & Oneko / Book One
A black-market data thief. A dog that shouldn't love him back. A secret Acheron will kill to bury.
Seventeen-year-old Daemon survives the rain-slicked slums of Neo-Kyoto the only way he knows how: stealing data nobody was supposed to touch, and coming home to the one thing in the city that's never lied to him: his cybernetically modified dog, Oneko.
Then a routine heist goes wrong in a way Daemon can't walk back. The hardware fused into Oneko isn't scrap. It's an Acheron Corporation prototype, and Oneko is Subject Zero-Nine, built and abandoned by the company that runs Neo-Kyoto end to end. The data shard from the same job holds something worse: proof of Project Neural Net, the program Acheron uses to make street kids disappear and never explain why.
Acheron's chief enforcer, Strike Lead Vane, is already moving. So Daemon and Oneko run, straight into the legend of Gimlorok, the hacker who supposedly died trying to get this exact truth out of the city, years before.
Nobody built Oneko to be loved. He is anyway. That might be the only weapon Daemon has left.
Expelled. Wanted. Still seventeen.
Kicked out of Meridian Academy for reasons he still won't fully explain. Fast hands, faster mouth, a talent for stealing data nobody was supposed to touch. Doesn't have a family. Has a dog. That's the whole plan.
Subject Zero-Nine.
Rescued from a scrap dealer three years ago, wired together from parts nobody could place. Loyal in a way that isn't supposed to be possible for a machine. Turns out there's a reason for that.
Acheron's best.
Doesn't raise his voice. Doesn't need to. If Vane has your file open, you've already lost the only version of this that ends well.
The city and the company that owns it.
A city built in the rain by a company that owns the rain. Acheron runs the power, the police, and most of what people call the future. Underneath it, the future has a cost nobody's supposed to add up.
Nick Cappello writes cyberpunk for readers who grew up half-online and never fully trusted the parts of the world that felt too convenient. Terminal Velocity is his first novel, the opening chapter of a trilogy he's been building for years.
The trilogy
Out now. A stolen dog, a stolen secret, and a city that wants both back.
Coming next. Daemon and Oneko run further than the city ever mapped, and find out they're not the only ones who got out.
Coming. Whatever's left of Acheron doesn't stay standing.
One email when Book Two goes live. Nothing before that.