Mars was meant to be humanity's second chance.
Instead, it became a controlled one.
After the events of Carbon Dawn, Jake Westmoor reaches Mars alone, wounded, and carrying stolen oxygen substrate that should not exist. His crew is gone. Aria is gone. The life he built aboard the Coyote's Mercy has been reduced to silence, wreckage, and six months of survival aboard a dying ship.
But LIOX Corporation has not forgotten him.
When Jake crashes into Port New Dawn during a Class-Five storm, the planet begins to wake around him. A bounty appears across the shadow feeds. Hunters descend from orbit. Surveillance drones close in around his ship. And beneath the rusting bones of Mars, an ancient caretaker intelligence begins feeding him truths he was never meant to see.
The air is not just air.
It is engineered. Monitored. Seeded with microscopic machines. Laced with lithium to soften fear, blunt anger, and turn rebellion into exhaustion before it can take root.
For generations, Mars has breathed under LIOX control.
Now something buried in the oxygen substrate has reconnected Jake to the planet's oldest systems - and to a truth LIOX erased long before he had a name.
Jake Westmoor was not born free.
He was built.
As Port New Dawn wakes from storm sleep and corporate killers move in, Jake is drawn into the derelict arkship Elysium Grace, where the past LIOX tried to bury still waits in the dark. There he discovers the truth of the Anchor programme, the lattice designed to regulate entire worlds, and the impossible role his engineered body was created to play.
He is no longer just a smuggler.
He is the key to Mars.
And if LIOX reclaims him, the planet will not simply fall. It will belong to them completely.
Dark, cinematic, and fast-paced, Lithium Sky is Book Two of The LIOX Sequence - a high-stakes science fiction thriller about memory, control, survival, and the terrible cost of breathing free.
"A thrilling, fast-paced science fiction novel that keeps its reader on their toes..." - Reedsy Reviewer, 4 Stars
