In the year 2147, memories weren’t kept—they were shattered .

The shard unfolded inside his mind: Soryn, years ago, standing before a colossal obsidian mirror. She had not broken her own past. She had shattered someone else’s —and hidden the pieces across a thousand realities. The mirror’s name was the Veritas Speculum , and it had once held the complete truth of a forgotten war that could end the Prism system forever.

Kaelen was a "Shardwalker," one of the few who could enter the Expanse without losing his identity. His latest retrieval, however, was different. The client—a woman named Soryn—had paid him in forbidden tech to find a shard labeled Null Reflection . When he finally located it, pulsing like black glass in a dead city made of fractured mirrors, he didn’t just see her memory. He downloaded it.