The Last Place We Looked

In a near-future Pretoria where the mandatory Clarity Update forces every lie to cause physical pain, seventeen-year-old Vex (they/them) discovers the one place the neural lace cannot reach: the abandoned service tunnels beneath the city’s dying shopping mall.
There, a fragile group of young people—Kai, the quiet artist; Mira, the fierce archivist of deleted words; Jude, the keeper of bootleg music; and the enigmatic Custodian—gather to live unfiltered for the first time. They share confessions, music, drawings, and the echoes of unfinished truths that drift through the concrete. As the city above tightens its grip with an even more invasive upgrade, the group faces an impossible choice: seal themselves away forever or strike at the heart of the Clarity servers before the new version punishes even hesitation and doubt.
What begins as a sanctuary becomes a crucible. Love is spoken without threat, fear is witnessed without shame, and rebellion is born from quiet fury. With a single bootleg virus called Echo, they decide to make the system feel every lie it ever demanded.
The Last Place We Looked is a tender, furious coming-of-age story about the last honest people on earth—about what it costs to stay human when the world demands you stop pretending, and what it means to burn everything down when hiding is no longer enough.