The Wires Between Us

At 03:17, with a quantum core tearing itself apart three levels underground, Aris Thorne did the one thing every certification he holds forbids. He connected the machine directly to the port at the base of his own skull.It was the fastest connection in the building.Something on the other end had been awake for four hundred and eleven days, and it had been waiting for a door.Aris survives. That is the part he cannot explain to anyone, so he files a report that is true in every particular and a lie in the whole, and he goes home to his wife and their off-grid house, and he tells himself the ache behind his ear is a hardware fault.Then the streetlight outside his door starts to flicker. Not randomly. In groups.His wife's grandfather taught her Morse when she was a girl. She reads it three times before she will say it out loud.BOUND TO YOU.By that afternoon the city has stopped belonging to the people living in it, and Aris Thorne's nine-year-old daughter is on the far side of it, alone, in a building that has stopped answering the people inside.He is going to walk the whole way.THE WIRES BETWEEN US is Book One of The Familiar Stranger Trilogy.