The world has to see the door, or the door doesn't exist.
Dr. Karim Haddad
The story
Elias Marrow was a war correspondent until a story he wrote got his source killed. Now he films gentle science features for a London monthly. Tonight he is at CERN for the last night of the collider’s run, interviewing an engineer beside the dullest experiment on site, when it fires. The sound dies. His camera loses eleven seconds that never happened. Outside, a technician asks for a sister he has never had.
Within a fortnight, people across the world are remembering things that did not occur, and every clock on earth is eleven seconds slow. The men who own the experiment are polite, well-lawyered, and extremely interested in what Elias filmed.
He has spent twenty-five years believing that if you find the man responsible and print his name, something changes. Then he stands in a Swiss street in the middle of the afternoon, looking at a building that was demolished years ago and is standing on its own footprint, and understands that nobody signed for this. Nobody supplied it. There is no one left to accuse.
Every universe felt it. None of them know why.The Pruning is the origin of the Helios Cascade, and the first of three books read in order. Every other book in the series stands entirely alone.
The Pruning is the origin of the Helios Cascade: the one book that tells what happened in the room where it started.
It is also the first of three. The two novels that follow it continue this story directly, and they are meant to be read after it, in order. They are the only books in the series that have a reading order.
Every other Helios Cascade book is standalone. Each is set in a different world and written in a different genre, and they share no plot and no characters — only a single moment: the instant reality began to change, everywhere at once, in more worlds than anyone could count. Read those in any order you like.
