Behind the books
The Question at the Heart of Cyborg Unclaimed
What do you do when your act of mercy creates a monster?
What do you do when your act of mercy creates a monster?
That’s the question I kept coming back to while writing this book. Not in a philosophical, abstract way — in a very specific, very personal way for Morrigan. She spares a soldier on the battlefield. One decision. And that decision costs her everything and sets a chain of events in motion she’s spent years trying to outrun.
I didn’t want it to feel heroic. It’s impulsive. Human. And the fallout is brutal.
That tension — between compassion and consequence — is really what Cyborg Unclaimed is about underneath all the sci-fi and romance. Both Morrigan and Luke are people defined by obligations they didn’t fully choose. She was shaped by a warrior priestess tradition that handed her an identity and told her not to question it. He was literally rebuilt into a weapon by people who didn’t ask permission. Neither of them gets to just… be a person for a long time.
The Colony changes that. Old orders don’t apply there. Nobody is handing them a script.
Which sounds like freedom, and it is, but it’s also terrifying when you’ve never had to decide who you are on your own terms.
I also really wanted to dig into what identity even means when your body has been altered or taken from you. Luke is more machine than man. Morrigan loses her wings — which for her species is about as close to losing yourself as it gets. What remains? What’s actually you when everything external has been stripped away?
I don’t think I answer that question cleanly. I don’t think it has a clean answer.
What I do think is that both of them figure out something important by the end: that choosing someone — deliberately, fully, knowing everything — might be the most human thing either of them has ever done.
That’s the heart of it. Everything else is just very entertaining wreckage on the way there.
