When a biotech startup called ScentSync claims it can match people using the chemistry of their immune systems, the promise is simple: find the person your body already knows is right.

Marcus Walsh doesn’t trust his own instincts anymore. After years of studying how people make decisions—and failing to make the right ones himself—he agrees to try the system. His result is definitive: a 94.7% match with a stranger named Elena.

Elena Vasquez believes in evidence. A nurse trained to trust procedure over feeling, she follows the science carefully. When she meets Marcus, what happens between them feels immediate, undeniable—and deeply unsettling. Because this time, certainty comes with a number.

At ScentSync, founder Maya Chen watches her company explode overnight. The science works. The matches are real. But beneath the system, a flaw emerges—one that calls into question not the attraction itself, but everything built on top of it.

As the company unravels, Marcus and Elena are left with a question no algorithm can answer:

If something feels real… does it matter how it started?

Volatile Compounds is a sharp, intimate novel about love, technology, and the fragile line between what we feel and what we’re told to feel.

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