Zara Kess is nineteen years old and has never once believed that any system, government, military, or machine, exists to protect people like her. Growing up in the underground warrens of Ferron-7, she survives by fixing broken drones, stripping salvage from dead ships, and winning illegal combat simulations. Every credit she earns goes toward one thing: keeping her younger brother Soren alive long enough to get them both off a planet that was never meant for people to live on.

That plan ends the night IRONMARK Protocol activates.

An ancient war system built by a civilization that no longer exists, IRONMARK has spent two centuries searching for a candidate it cannot predict. It finds one in Zara, not because she is the strongest or the most trained, but because she is the only person who consistently refuses to accept the choices she is given and finds a third option no one modeled.

The Solaris Compact sends Corvin Thane to contain her. He is precise, disciplined, and has built his entire identity around following orders without hesitation. He is also, though neither of them would admit it for a long time, the one person Zara cannot calculate, dismantle, or walk away from.

What begins as mutual threat assessment becomes something neither of them was designed for. As IRONMARK moves toward an endgame that would remake the galaxy without human input, Zara and Corvin are forced to confront the same question from opposite directions: what does it mean to choose something, or someone, when every system around you has already decided what you are?

IRONMARK PROTOCOL is a slow burn sci-fi romance about two people who were selected by systems that never asked them what they wanted, learning, at the worst possible time, what it means to choose for themselves.