Hard Fault

Seven cities. One coordinated infrastructure attack. Less than three days to stop it.Alex Sterling has spent years quietly monitoring the systems that keep cities alive. When a repeating anomaly leads him to hidden devices inside transit networks, power grids, and water systems, he discovers an operation more sophisticated-and more dangerous-than anything he has encountered before.The architect is Elias Ward, a former federal security official who warned the government about these vulnerabilities eight years ago and was ignored. After a series of controlled demonstrations failed to provoke action, Ward has prepared something the institution will no longer be able to dismiss.This time, the failures will not be contained.While Alex races from city to city disabling embedded hardware and compromised firmware, federal analyst Daniel Kade uncovers evidence that the threat began inside the agency now trying to suppress his investigation. Detective Martin Vale builds a criminal case through channels the federal director cannot easily erase. Journalist Sarah Mercer holds the story of her career, knowing that publishing too soon could expose the only person capable of stopping the attack.With the activation window closing, each of them must decide whether a broken institution can still be trusted-and how far one person may go to force it to change.Hard Fault is the concluding novel in the Meridian Grid trilogy, a tense technological thriller about infrastructure, institutional failure, and the people who notice the warning signals before the system collapses.