A single prick in the crush of bodies. A collapse blamed on heat, stress, or panic. No blood. No scream. Just silence where a voice used to be.

Rowan Calder was raised in a house that never stopped screaming. His father’s fists, his mother’s tears, the endless laughter from a TV that mocked the quiet he craved. He found his answer in a syringe, clean, precise, obedient. It entered without resistance and left no trace.

Years later, while the corporations pay him to protest for the noise, he delivers silence instead, into the heart of America’s rage: packed protests, chanting crowds, megaphones spitting demands. He slips through them like smoke, needles hidden. Union leaders drop mid-sentence. Agitators gasp into dead livestreams. Organizers crumple while the swarm keeps marching, oblivious.

The bodies pile up. The news calls them tragedies. But someone is watching the pattern. Detective Grayson Holt, haunted by his own ghosts from the riots of 2020, sees the punctures no one else wants to admit exist. He knows this isn’t random. This is deliberate. This is pruning.

And the killer is getting bolder.

Yet Rowan keeps coming. One more voice to silence. One more moment of perfect stillness.

Because the quiet is addictive.

And once you taste it, the roar of the world becomes unbearable.

What happens when the venom isn’t in the poison… but in the hush that follows?