The Last Mile Home
In a world where caring gets you killed, twelve-year-old Echo learns this lesson too late.
Nameless and invisible, Echo survives in the ruins by staying small and forgotten. When Maya appears with bread, soap, and the first kindness he's ever known, she gives him something more dangerous than hope—she gives him identity. For the first time, Echo believes he matters.
He's wrong.
Maya's care was conditioning. Her kindness was commerce. Echo isn't being saved—he's being prepared for sale.
Sold to an underground facility where children sort contaminated scrap for impossible quotas, Echo discovers that survival means shutting down everything human inside him. But when he befriends Lily, another broken kid just trying to make it through each day, he makes the fatal mistake of caring again.
One act of selfless kindness. One moment of choosing another person's survival over his own. That's all it takes for the facility's "processing" to begin—systematic torture designed to rewire his brain until caring becomes impossible.
Now, as a mysterious figure in black tears through the facility to free them all, Echo must confront a truth more devastating than any physical pain: sometimes the people who save you arrive too late to save who you used to be.
The Last Mile Home is a brutal exploration of what it costs to remain human in a world designed to break you. Some lights at the end of the tunnel lead to cliffs. Some hope is just another kind of poison. And some damage can never be undone—no matter who comes to rescue you.
For readers who want authentic trauma over power fantasy. For those brave enough to walk toward a light they'll never reach.
This captures the emotional devastation, the false hope structure, and positions it as literary/psychological rather than action-adventure. It also warns readers what they're getting into while making them want to experience Echo's tragic journey.