An Isolation

Pava Cruz is seventeen years old, a citizen of the Tohono O'odham Nation, and detained at a graduation party on land her ancestors have occupied for thirteen thousand years. She has her enrollment card. It doesn't matter.

Jhonn León is forty-three years old, a Venezuelan engineer, and swept up in a workplace raid after two decades of building a life and waiting for the citizenship he was promised. He has documentation. It doesn't matter.

Neither is supposed to be here. Neither is supposed to survive what comes next.
Taken separately. Held separately. They know nothing of each other — and that's not an accident.

Beyond the reach of lawyers and oversight and official record, a facility exists that no one acknowledges and no one leaves unchanged. What happens inside isn't detention. It isn't interrogation. It's something that doesn't have a name yet — a program that treats human beings as raw material and calls what it does to them optimization.

An Isolation is a novel about the kind of disappearance that doesn't make the news — the bureaucratic kind, the kind that operates in plain sight and produces no paper trail. About two people chosen because no one would come looking. About what it costs to remain human inside a system that has already decided you aren't one.

Trigger Warning: This novel contains graphic depictions of institutional abuse, forced medical experimentation, physical and psychological violence, immigration detention, sexual assault, child endangerment, and death. Intended for mature audiences only.