Action

Twenty-five-year-old courier Leo Brown arrives at luxury apartment 4812 with a late delivery. No one answers. Leo steps inside—and wakes in the same apartment, now on the forty-eighth floor of a tower in central Meridian.
    Meridian is a city swallowed by an anomalous catastrophe and sealed behind a quarantine wall. Rain rises toward the clouds, a train crosses a missing section of track, and neither distance nor time can be trusted.
    Every stable anomaly has a causal kernel and rules of its own. Following those rules may save a life. One mistake can turn an observer into a participant.
    Leo can see anomaly descriptions, kernels, and rules. By spending anomalous energy, he can alter them. When an anomaly collapses, he can absorb its remnant and retain a reduced version of its function. Yet anyone who understands an explanation of this power immediately forgets it.
    When an elite Global Bureau of Anomalies team reaches Leo through a temporary route, he expects rescue. Instead, their instruments find a human body with no causal origin in the current version of the world. The GBA refuses evacuation and registers him as an S-rank anomaly named >strong>“Leo Brown.”>/strong>
    To return home, Leo must escape the tower, cross an impossible city, and discover what connects the two versions of apartment 4812. But every rule he changes forces him to ask the same question: is he a human trapped among anomalies—or an anomaly struggling to remain human?