The Price of Shade

In a city where survival depends on who receives shade, every map hides a moral choice. Mara Vey is a senior planner for the Civic Shade Grid, the vast infrastructure that protects millions from deadly heat. She has spent her career believing that careful planning saves lives. Then she discovers something impossible. Entire neighbourhoods have quietly disappeared from the city's emergency protection maps.
The people are still there. The protection is not. As an unprecedented heat emergency approaches, Mara uncovers a system where algorithms, political priorities and corporate interests quietly decide whose lives are worth protecting. Restoring one district means taking protection away from another. Every solution creates new victims. With time running out, Mara must challenge the system she helped build before the coming heatwave turns hidden decisions into public tragedy.
The Price of Shade is an intelligent speculative thriller about climate resilience, public ethics, technology and power. It explores what happens when governments optimise survival, corporations influence public infrastructure and ordinary people become invisible inside the models designed to protect them. Perfect for readers who enjoy thoughtful speculative fiction, literary dystopian novels and morally complex thrillers in the tradition of The Ministry for the Future, The Deluge and Station Eleven.