Chrono Fracture

There is a hole in the world exactly the size and shape of Elara Harrigan.No birth record. No employment history. Forty-one people walk past a desk that was never there. Zyla Harrigan’s sister has been gone three years, and Zyla is the only person alive who knows she ever existed - because eleven days before the end, Elara took off her locket, pressed it into Zyla’s palm, and said she wanted to put something somewhere that wasn’t on her.Zyla is an engineer on sublevel nine of the Chronos Preservation Grid, the machine that has held time steady across eleven nations since 2087. She is not paid to notice things. She has noticed that the chronal echoes are converging, that they have been converging for six days, and that their source is not in her century at all.It is in the founding minute of the Grid itself.What she finds is not a malfunction. It’s a policy. For twenty-three years the Grid has been quietly removing people - not killing them; removing them, unpicking them from the record backward through their own childhoods until there is no one left to miss them - and the man who signs the orders has excellent reasons, and has written every one of them down.To stop him, Zyla has to reach the seventeenth of October 2087 and put a flaw into the founding reference before eleven governments certify it into every node that will ever be built. She has a passive anchor that will drop her somewhere in an eleven-hour window. A fresh surgical wound in her leg. Eleven days. An enforcer who is nine hundred and six credentials deep in a conspiracy he inherited from his father. And a Director of Records who is thirty percent erased and paused on a queue, waiting nineteen years for a status field to change from HELD to RESUME.She also has the locket.At the end of it she will stand at a bench in a basement in Rotterdam with the founding instrument of the Chronos Preservation Grid open in front of her, thirty seconds on an institutional clock, and room in the channel for exactly one more line.She knows what she is going to write.She has not let herself work out what it will cost to take it back out.