Mara Voss knows exactly what your file says about you.

America never abolished citizenship. After a decade of crises, it simply replaced it with standing — a revocable status scored from your ancestry, your health, and the long trail of data you leave behind — and stamped it as a small ring beside every name. Closed for the favored. Open for the doubted. Gray for the erased.

Mara works the government window in metro Detroit, where bodies and documents are made to agree. She is very good at it. She has to be: her own ring has burned amber her whole life, and her talent for keeping a spotless record is the only thing between her teenage daughter and the gray edge of the map.

Then a single case arrives that she cannot reconcile and cannot refuse: her grandmother, who has spent a lifetime refusing to be entered into anything at all. To keep her family recognized, all Mara has to do is sign. To remain herself, she has to decide what being recognized was ever worth.

Wild Type is a quiet, devastating novel about the administrative grammar of cruelty, the inheritance of fear, and what it means to be remembered by hand — a near-future built entirely from documented history, imagining no horror that the past has not already performed, with paperwork.

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