The Fraying Light: 1

A dead engineer. Eleven missing seconds. An ancient machine that should not be able to fail.Kael Voss can read the histories objects leave behind.When a maintenance engineer dies inside one of Durath's ancient Anchor Spires, Kael is called in to find out why. The death should have an explanation.It doesn't.Two separate objects carry the same impossible absence: eleven seconds in which Kael's ability finds not damage, corruption, or interference-but nothing at all.Architect Lyra Thessan has a different problem. Durath's paired Spires are compensating for something her models say should not exist. As measurements stop agreeing with physical reality and failures begin to spread, Kael and Lyra uncover evidence that the governing Conclave has been tracking a much larger danger for years.And hiding it.But the deeper they investigate, the worse the truth becomes.The Spires aren't causing the instability.They're holding it back.Now one of them is beginning to fail.With an artificial intelligence questioning the limits of its own classifications, an investigator discovering what institutional secrecy costs the people it was meant to protect, and a rival willing to risk lives for truths the Conclave refuses to reveal, Kael and Lyra must determine what is happening to Durath before the ancient machinery keeping their world coherent stops doing the one thing no one knows how to replace.And Kael is running out of something more personal than time.The Fraying Light is the first novel in The Anchored Reaches, a character-driven science-fiction mystery about memory, consciousness, ancient technology, buried history, and the terrifying difference between a machine that has stopped working-and one that is working perfectly while reality fails around it.