Fractured Sky

In 1908, something crossed the sky over Siberia and flattened a thousand square miles of forest without leaving a crater. It was not a meteor. It was the first piece to come down. A century later, physicist Mara Voss catches a flaw in a routine test - a distortion with no right to exist - and is read into the oldest secret her government keeps: a recovered machine that does not break the laws of physics so much as set them quietly aside. Near it, spacetime bends, and time runs at the wrong speed. For decades they have studied it in the dark. Now, over Voss's objection, they have pushed it too far, and a self-sustaining distortion is spreading across the Nevada desert, wider every day, and nothing anyone knows will switch it off. The machine is one piece of three. Moscow holds another, Beijing the third, and no government will trust the others with the truth even now, with a hole opening in the world. Stopping it will take all three artifacts, all three enemies, and a kind of honesty none of them was built for. And the intelligence that made the machine - and let it fall exactly where a young species would find it - is still out there, watching to see what that species does with a second chance it never earned.