Marked for Reclamation
About
In the Marked for Reclamation, nothing is truly broken. Just abandoned.
Sixteen-year-old Trevino “Tre” Heath survives by repairing what everyone else throws away.
In a world where megacorporations own nearly every piece of advanced technology, Tre has a gift that could get him arrested. He can take discarded machines apart, rebuild them, and sometimes make them better than they were before.
So, he keeps his head down, scavenges what he can, and trusts no one. Until he hears a child crying inside a restricted government disposal site.
The boy calls himself Kade. He is injured, confused, and carries a corporate identification implant beneath his skin. He doesn’t understand why Tre wants to leave him behind.
And the surveillance drones searching overhead aren’t looking for a missing child.
They’re looking for escaped property.
Tre has spent years dreaming of enough money, enough food, and a place safe enough to finally call his own. Protecting Kade could cost him all of it.
But the longer they run, the stranger Kade becomes.
Broken machines respond to his touch. Technology seems to speak to him. And the corporations hunting them will destroy anyone who discovers what they created.
Tre has always believed survival means never needing anyone.
Kade is about to teach him otherwise.
In a world that decides what has value and what should be discarded, two boys are about to discover that some things are worth saving at any cost.
Marked for Reclamation will appeal to readers of Neal Shusterman’s Unwind, Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, and Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Like Unwind, it explores a society willing to treat young people as property rather than individuals, while Little Brother shares Tre’s world of surveillance, technology, and a teenager using his own technical skills against a powerful system.
Praise for this book
West's strongest achievement here is Tre — a scavenger-technician whose entire worldview is built from repaired circuitry and abandonment, and whose reluctant unfolding into responsibility for Kade is earned in small, believable increments rather than a single sentimental turn. The haggling scene with Marcel — "You'll put it in the front half of the used section for five hundred" / "You think my customers are fools?" — establishes Tre's competence and economic precarity with real specificity before we ever meet Kade, so when Tre keeps walking away from the boy (three separate times, each retreat slightly less convincing than the last), the eventual "I'm getting you out of this place" lands as character development, not plot convenience.