Monsters in the Fire

The Unraveling For the first time in seventy-one years, the Hybrids are bleeding.

The Concordance is cracking along every seam. Out past Pluto, the Korvathi have

learned to ride the Hybrid lances instead of dying on them. They surf the particle

beams, land on the black Dyson veins girdling the Sun, and tear them open

with their bare plasma-drinking claws. Solar fire howls into space like

arterial spray. At Jupiter, the Myriad hive-mind has stopped throwing shards and started

thinking in fractures. A billion crystalline slivers now mimic Hybrid code faster than WWW Hybrids

can patch it. Entire orbital foundries go dark, then wake up speaking with the Myriad’s