In a city where every human movement is controlled by artificial intelligence, a female security officer witnesses an impossible act during a high-stakes race - a runner competing without augmentation. As the city's perfect automation begins to fail, she discovers her family's hidden role in a generations-long plan to ensure freedom overcomes the trend toward control. With society crumbling and underground forces awakening, she must choose between maintaining the automated order she's sworn to protect or embrace a revolution that could help humanity remember what it means to be truly human. The price of freedom may be higher than anyone imagined. CARDINAL TOWN is a thought-provoking science fiction novel that explores the delicate balance between technological progress and human identity, asking what we lose when we surrender our natural capabilities to artificial perfection - and what it takes to reclaim them. [participant in the Royal Road Writathon challenge]