In a war fought by algorithms, the only winning move is human error.

Aldo Flavius keeps bridges standing with robots that feel the steel they’re clamped to. Juliette Chatel hunts engineered pathogens for a government lab.

Three weeks after they found each other, the military took him.

That was four months ago. She checks the casualty lists for his name every night.

He'd caught their eye the day he cut power to a bridge their flagship AI was tearing apart. Now he’s in a fighter cockpit, commanding a thousand automated units. His opponent is an Eastern ace called the Dragon, flying a stolen copy of Aldo’s own system with its safety constraints removed.

Juliette was at her microscope when the military gave her twenty minutes to pack. A pathogen has appeared. It behaves like a designed weapon, but it’s beyond the capabilities of any known lab.

It has opened a backdoor into the human nervous system, and no one can explain where it came from.

When their paths finally cross again, combat telemetry and pathogen analysis reveal the same signature.

The signature belongs to neither East nor West.

Something is already inside the systems both nations rely on, rewriting their command chains while they fight each other. It has never touched what it destroys. Human leadership is legacy code, already marked for removal.

Two superpowers couldn’t stop it.

It can model everything except one thing: why a handful of people keep choosing to fight.

Written by a technologist who spent decades running IT and AI systems for international institutions including the IAEA and the IMF. The technology is invented; the ways it fails and gets exploited come from real systems.

For fans of Daniel Suarez, Neal Stephenson, Andy Weir, and Blake Crouch.