Most people think seeing the future is a gift. For Kael Droven, it’s just a spreadsheet of how everyone he knows is going to die. Living in the suffocating lower tiers of a vertical city, Kael uses his Thread-Sight to help the Unbound resistance fight back against the corporate tyranny of the Sovereign Compact. The rebels think he’s their miracle. They think a boy who can see the future can hand them a clean, heroic victory. But there are no clean victories when you're fighting an empire. When Kael runs the numbers, the math gives him a horrific answer: every single future where the rebels fight fair ends in total annihilation. There is only one timeline where the city survives. To reach it, Kael doesn't need to lead an army—he needs to lock himself in a server room, overwrite the city's infrastructure codes, and personally choke the air out of entire residential sectors. He isn't a mastermind playing a game. He is a tired, bleeding twenty-two-year-old who realized that the only way to save the world was to let it curse his name forever. He chose the worst future. Now he has to pay the bill.