The sky over the ruins of what was once Seattle was a bruised, permanent violet, the color of a fading hematoma. It wasn’t the natural glow of a sunset, but the atmospheric consequence of the Great Exchange—the three-day nuclear spat that had occurred three years ago, though most had lost count of the months. Jason sat on a balcony of a penthouse that didn’t belong to him, wrapped in a heated cashmere blanket that a drone had delivered forty minutes ago. The blanket was soft,

The bell above the door did not ring; it sang. It was a vintage brass wind chime Leo had tuned himself using a file, a guitar tuner, and an embarrassing amount of free time during the Great Sriracha Shortage of last winter. It chimed in a perfect G-major chord, designed to trigger a subconscious release of dopamine in anyone crossing the threshold. Today, however, the dopamine was strictly one-way. Nobody was crossing. Leo Bridger, twenty-four years old, self-appointed Empero

The ticket had been purchased at a Sunoco station just off Route 208, outside of New Wilmington, Pennsylvania. It was an impulse buy, the product of a weekly five-dollar pool managed by the faculty secretary of Allegheny State College’s Division of Natural Sciences. There were twenty-four of them in total. They represented every corner of the natural sciences: four biologists, three chemists, three physicists, two geologists, two meteorologists, two botanists, two zoologists,