Jax Harlan
**Jax Harlan**
Jax Harlan is a thirty-four-year-old waiter in the underbelly of New Dallas, grinding out another lifetime behind the bar of a dive called *The Rusted Halo*.
He is not a hero. He is not important. In the Sprawl, that is how most people survive.
Short brown hair going gray at the temples. Tired blue eyes. Perpetual stubble. A body worn thin by skipped meals and too many shifts under a demon boss who can ruin his next life as easily as this one. He lives in a capsule apartment three blocks from work and keeps his head down, because asking questions in this city is how people disappear.
Jax has lived before. He does not remember how many times. Like everyone else left behind after the world broke, he comes back, forgets, and keeps going.
Then one night a stranger walks into the bar, and the careful nothing of Jax’s life starts to crack.
What follows is not a chosen-one story. It is the story of an ordinary man who was never supposed to notice the truth — and the dangerous moment when he does.
