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The Fractured Sky
Paperback
Publisher: Alison Croft
Published: Sep 26 2026
Pages: 202
Weight: 0.61
Height: 0.46 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In the suffocating industrial sprawl of Sector Seven, humanity survives beneath a manufactured firmament-an artificial canopy of amber phosphors and failing electromagnetic anchors engineered to hold back a shattered magnetosphere. Jeremy Jez Viscount asks for nothing more than an honest cargo haul and an extra ration of clean oxygen, nursing the cynical detachment of a pilot who measures life by fuel margins and structural stress. But when a hairline fracture across the civic dome erupts into a violent, violet cataract, gravity unmoors from the bedrock. Tenement towers shear from their foundations and drift upward into a howling tear in the sky. Escaping the collapsing district in his battered freighter, Jez is thrust from simple survival into a planetary catastrophe as reality itself begins to peel backward like scorched parchment.
Conscripted into a desperate expedition aboard the Aegis-a heavily armored prototype vessel built to withstand atmospheric collapse-Jez joins a crew bound together by grief and unspoken guilt. Flanking him are Kira Mac MacInnis, a hyper-pragmatic tactical officer haunted by the loss of her former unit, and Dr. Anthony Baracewski, the broken quantum meteorologist whose catastrophic hubris shattered the global sky. Baracewski unveils a harrowing truth: Project Lux-Aeterna did not merely break Earth's climate-it anchored the planet to a dying, parasitic parallel universe that is actively cannibalizing their timeline to sustain itself. Carrying an experimental mathematical stabilizer, the crew must pilot the crippled ship directly toward the oceanic vortex of the Fracture Core, navigating stuttering valleys of distorted time, predatory crystalline entities that stalk the shadows, and atmospheric mirages that weaponize their deepest psychological traumas into lethal physical manifestations.
As the Aegis penetrates the eye of the spacetime maelstrom, the journey evolves from an endurance test against hostile physics into an existential reckoning. With the hull warping under conflicting gravitational fields and the laws of cause and effect breaking down around them, the trio must confront the devastating cost of atonement. Sealing the rift requires an impossible flight along the burning arc of a permanent Fire Rainbow, severing Earth's connection to all alternate timelines and sealing humanity in permanent cosmic isolation. To reclaim an authentic sky and grant their ruined world a clean horizon, each survivor must confront their past failures and face the ultimate sacrifice before the final green flash resets the boundaries of existence.
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