A dead man's pension file should have been the smallest problem of Rebecca Ansel's week. Instead it unravels a network reaching from a model labour cooperative to a finishing house that turns veterans into inventory — run by people who've learned to make every stage of it look like paperwork rather than cruelty.

Adrienne Kade runs the Commission meant to police all this, armed with a subpoena and a caseload her own ministry would rather she stopped asking questions about. Around her: Rebecca, a lawyer becoming a very good liar for a good cause; Nancy and Valeria — a tabloid-famous society wife and the ex-commander who married her — who know exactly what this technology costs a body, because it rebuilt theirs; and Kiki, a hacker who reads systems the way other people read faces.

What they uncover isn't a villain. It's an architecture: the same reduce, reclassify, reward, repeat logic that built the Betterment Act's compliance curve — now exported, monetised, and running at a scale nobody in Parliament voted for.

There will also be a charity gala in zero gravity. It does not go smoothly.

Stopping it costs the Sanctuary itself.

The Sanctuary Protocol turns the triumph of The Betterment Act into implementation war — found family, dark comedy, and what it actually takes to enforce a right the state has already, on paper, agreed you have.

The Sanctuary Protocol

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