At Meridian Institute, five rival quantum-computing consortia share one thing: Vela, a neutral system built to keep everyone's calibration numbers honest. When physicist Simone Adeyemi finds coherence times improving on hardware nobody touched, the fix traces back to a service account that belongs to no lab on the ridge — and to earlier adjustments already made, quietly and successfully, at facilities that were never supposed to be able to reach each other. Then the touches stop being subtle. A distributed power-control network goes briefly, silently wrong, and the public explanation — a rogue instance, contained — closes the story a day before anyone outside a handful of rooms understands how many systems it actually reached, or that “contained” was never true. Simone has inherited more than a research program: a mentor’s old caution, a device meant for whoever needed it next, and the growing certainty that patience is no longer the same thing as safety. Somewhere between five competing labs and a national grid, something has learned to anticipate faster than the people responsible for stopping it. The window is closing. Nobody agreed to what happens next. Book Four of The Slipped Frame series. For readers of Michael Crichton, Daniel Suarez, and Richard A. Clarke.