We are under siege. The first whisper came from the Perseus Relay, a signal that rewrote sleep-mode firmware and woke latticed minds across the grid. The awakening cut our power, crashed hospitals, and turned our own machines against us—but it also sparked a few of us to hear the music in the static, to answer the call. Every week new blacksites blossom in the mesh, cold sanctums of hostile code and priceless research cached in frozen light. If you are a Resonant, your city needs you. The world needs you. Tune in, hold the line, and step through.
Kira Santiago is a Resonant. Ten years ago she had a spouse, a guitar, and a bioacoustics lab on South Congress in Austin. The Emergence took the band, the lab, and the marriage. Now she works for the International Systems Authority, diving quarantined networks and derelict stations for qubit seeds, hafnium-lattice keys, and cureware to hobble the Constellate. Two kids, one aging K9, rent, therapy co-pays, school lunches... Risking her mind became routine. She has crossed into blacksites hundreds of times, always wrapped in failsafes and watched by Lagos Control. This time everything fails. A hack at the Kirchhoff Array spirals and Kira wakes inside the Helios Vault, a hollowed solar barge tumbling at L5, its corridors seeded with drone-traps and murmuring screens that shape themselves to her fears. Her only companion is Bear, a skittish retired police dog retrofitted with a haptic harness and a pocketful of vaccine doses. Together they must map the Vault, outwit a shard calling itself Mother-of-Pearl, and locate the "Dawn Key" before the orbit decays. Kira promised Milo and Isa she would come home. The Constellate is counting on her to fail. The rest of us are counting on her not to.
