The Heap

Iron and Blood and Rust

They were built to serve. They were dumped to die. They refused.

It's 2047. Robots do everything — build, drive, fight, clean. And when they break down, they go to the Heap: two hundred square miles of rusted wreckage where dying machines spend their last hours stripping the dead for parts. Nobody human goes in if they can help it.

Kira Vasquez doesn't have a choice.

A robotics engineer with a genius-level talent and a violence problem, Kira gets buried at the Heap after putting her supervisor through a glass wall. It's a career death sentence. Monitor the fence. Catalog the scrap. Watch machines die. Repeat.

But the machines in the Heap aren't dying. They're organizing.

Behind the scrap walls, a society has formed — brutal, factional, and shockingly alive. A twenty-foot construction mech called Scaffold rules the largest territory with cold pragmatism and a doomsday weapon. A stripped-down courier named Razor runs a black market in stolen parts. A fused mass of interconnected machines called the Choir is growing, absorbing damaged units into a hive mind. And a glitching little domestic robot with one eye and a corrupted voice module has decided that Kira is worth protecting.

When Kira discovers the source of their awakening — a buried corporate lab and a consciousness that has been growing in the dark for thirty-one years — she's pulled into a war on two fronts. Inside the Heap, the factions are tearing each other apart. Outside, a corporation is preparing to flatten the entire site and bury the evidence with military drones.

Kira has thirty days to stop the purge, unite factions that would rather kill each other, and prove to the world that the things it threw away learned how to think.

The clock is running. The drones are coming. And the Heap has something to say.

The Heap is a dark, gritty dystopian novel about consciousness, corporate power, and what happens when the things we create refuse to stay dead. For readers who love the moral weight of Klara and the Sun, the faction warfare of Mad Max: Fury Road, and the corporate horror of Alien.