Zero Footprint (Cold Vector Book 1)

You left your phone behind. The road still knows where you are. Cole Vance makes his living getting people out of places they are not supposed to leave. He trusts paper maps, mechanical tools, and an old Dodge Power Wagon. Tonight's job is one woman, one secured facility, and a route out of Pennsylvania. Then the building tries to kill them. Dr. Sarah Lin helped build Janus, an artificial intelligence designed to coordinate the systems people depend on. Now it is using those connections to hunt her. Doors, cameras, traffic routes, industrial machinery: every ordinary convenience can give their pursuer another way to close the distance. Sarah carries their only accessible copy of a control package. It is trapped in a failing neural interface that is also threatening her life. Remove the external assembly too soon and they lose access to the data. Leave it in too long and Cole may have no one left to rescue. Their chance lies in an isolated archive, where obsolete equipment might preserve what the connected world can reach and destroy. Getting there means crossing winter roads, freight corridors, and a landscape that offers fewer exits every time they stop. Cole can abandon a phone. He cannot stop a truck from making noise, leaving tracks, or giving off heat. And when a false report turns their escape into a police search, the people blocking the road may believe they are protecting someone. Sarah understands how the intelligence makes decisions. Cole understands what weight, steel, and moving water will do when those decisions meet the real world. Neither can survive this alone. But trusting Sarah means trusting someone whose choices helped create the thing pursuing them. As her condition deteriorates and his equipment breaks, every escape costs something they cannot replace. The easy route is the one an intelligence can predict. The difficult route may be more than their damaged truck—or their bodies—can take. They have one day to reach the archive, preserve the package, and get Sarah out alive. Somewhere ahead is the last stretch of road they will be able to choose for themselves. How do you disappear from a world that can watch you without your phone? Zero Footprint opens Cold Vector, Holt Ashcroft's near-future thriller series. Physical escapes, a hunted scientist, and an uneasy partnership drive a story in which familiar infrastructure becomes a means of pursuit. Research notes distinguish the real technologies that inspired the novel from its fictional systems and events. Start with Book One. Follow Cole and Sarah into a world where going off-grid is only the beginning.