Dream Runner

Cole Brennan dives into other people's minds for a living. Three years ago, one dive cost him a piece of himself he's never gotten back.

In near-future Seoul, dream-access technology lets the desperate reach the people medicine can't save - coma patients, the locked-in, the lost. Cole works the underground version: jury-rigged, illegal, dangerous. When a grieving father hires him to reach his comatose daughter, Sofia, Cole sees something in her file that changes everything - a project code connecting her case to Iris Tan, the test subject he failed to save years ago, who has been trapped ever since with fragments of her own memory living inside his.

Sofia wasn't just a victim of a system glitch. She was a scientist who found a fatal flaw in the technology itself - the same flaw that took Iris - and hid the evidence inside her own mind before she could expose it. Now Cole has to go in after both: the woman he's spent three years failing to let go of, and the truth that could bring down the corporation responsible.

Every dive costs him another piece of himself. The deeper he goes, the less certain he is of what's still his.

With a hard medical clock ticking, a rival diver he can't fully trust, and a corporation willing to let a young woman's mind disintegrate rather than risk exposure, Cole is forced toward a choice no version of the job prepared him for - and an answer to a question that's been chasing him for years: how much of who you are is built from what you remember, and what's left of you once you let it go?

Dream Runner is a near-future psychological thriller for readers who loved the dream-logic tension of Inception, the medical dread of Coma, and the unraveling interiority of Annihilation.