HYBRIDS

Thalen Ferren has always felt out of sync with the city-but lately, it's the city that feels wrong. Streetlights stutter in patterns they shouldn't. Screens flicker into symbols that vanish the second he looks directly at them. And every time the spiral returns in his mind, his thoughts grow heavier-like something unseen is pressing down on his consciousness.

Then the drones arrive.

Unmarked. Silent. Patient. They hover outside his building and pulse in perfect time with his heartbeat, reading his biology like a signal-and logging him like a file. This isn't surveillance. It's containment.

With Marc-his only real anchor to sanity-and Elyra, a relentless stranger carrying her own scars and dangerous knowledge, Thalen is pulled into an underground reality Praxus has spent decades engineering: dampener fields, "corrections," and a network designed to rewrite people from the inside out.

A defected Praxus analyst whispers a name for what's happening to him: Echo Protocol. And the next step is already in motion.

Phase Zero is beginning.

Because Praxus doesn't want Thalen dead.
It wants him usable.