What's the story behind the story? What inspired you to write this book?
Fractured started with one image: a girl looks at a storefront window, and her reflection smiles a half-second before she does. Everything else grew out of asking what that would cost her. The first two books were about Aiko surviving people who wanted to use her. This one is about what happens three years later, when she’s built a quiet life on top of that silence, and the silence turns out to have been listening the whole time. I’ve spent a long career in cybersecurity, and the idea that the most dangerous breach is the one you trust—the channel you never think to close—is the engine under the whole book. I wanted a thriller where the horror isn’t the monster at the door. It’s realizing the door has been open for years.
If you had to pick theme songs for the main characters of your book, what would they be?
I write and edit to film composers, so these are the tracks that were actually playing.
Aiko: Max Richter, “On the Nature of Daylight” — grief that keeps moving forward.
Hiroto: Jóhann Jóhannsson, “Flight from the City” — a man who has made every decision already and is waiting to see which ones were wrong.
Mercy: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, anything off the Gone Girl score — clinical, courteous, no pulse.
The Queen: Tim Hecker, because she speaks from every wall at once and his music sounds like a room remembering a sound.
Liam gets no song. For most of this book he’s a signal that only partly resembles him, and I wanted that to stay unresolved.
What's your favorite genre to read? Is it the same as your favorite genre to write?
Science fiction and horror, and only partly. I read sci-fi for the systems — a world with rules, and a writer who’s thought through what those rules do to the people inside them — and horror to see how the machinery of dread works. But I write thrillers for younger readers, dark ones, because that’s the age when you first find out the adults don’t have the full map either. Aiko’s series lives where all three meet: the structure of a thriller, the rules of a sci-fi world, and the dread of a horror novel underneath it. I also write darker LitRPG for an older audience, and what everything I write has in common is systems — how they work, where they break, and who gets hurt when they do.
What books are on your TBR pile right now?
Other Worlds Than These, the Stephen King and Peter Straub finale to the Talisman books. I’ve been waiting for a third Jack Sawyer novel since Black House, and I want to see how King closes a door that two writers opened. And There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm — a novel about ideas that erase themselves from your memory as you learn them, which is the most frightening containment-breach premise I know of. For a book I’m writing about a channel nobody thought to close, it’s practically research.
What scene in your book was your favorite to write?
There’s a scene on a fishing boat in the middle of the book where Aiko finally has a conversation with the version of herself that lives in the glass. No action, no villain in the room — just two people who have shared a body for three years working out, for the first time, who was holding what. I’d been building toward it for two books, and it still surprised me when I wrote it. The other is a department-store scene with the series villain, Mercy, who is the most courteous character I’ve ever written and the one I’d least want to meet. Both editors who worked on the book flagged the same two scenes as their favorites, which told me the book was pointed where I thought it was.
Do you have any quirky writing habits? (lucky mugs, cats on laps, etc.)
My one real habit is scoring the work. I keep playlists sorted by character rather than by mood — one for Mercy, one for the mirror scenes, a neutral instrumental set for line edits where I need to hear the sentences and not the composer. If the wrong playlist is on, the scene comes out wrong and needs to be rewritten, and I’ve gotten better at noticing that before I’ve written too much.
Do you have a motto, quote or philosophy you live by?
Fish in true water. It’s the note I write on anything that feels convenient: a fix that solves the plot but doesn’t cost anyone anything. Readers can smell a solution the author handed the character. If the book is working, every door Aiko walks through should have been paid for by her, by Hiroto, by someone — and the reader should be able to see the receipt.
If you could choose one thing for readers to remember after reading your book, what would it be?
That the parts of you that keep secrets to protect each other are the exact parts that get used. Aiko’s family is built on load-bearing silences — things nobody says because saying them would hurt — and this book is about what an enemy can do with that. I’d want a reader to close it and think about which doors in their own life are open because nobody ever checked.
