The story
Elias Marrow quit war reporting after a story got his source killed. Now he writes gentle features for a London science magazine. On 27 June 2026 he’s at CERN to film the final beams, interviewing an engineer beside the smallest, dullest experiment on site, when it fires.
Sound dies. Time skips. A technician starts asking for a sister he never had.
Days later, a two-note tone is heard around the world at the same instant. Clocks slip. People wake remembering lives that never happened. Elias’s hotel room is searched, his flat is torn apart, and a polite woman in a rental car starts turning up outside his daughter’s house.
The hidden memory card in his wallet holds the only record of the moment it began. To find out what really happened in that hut, Elias must find the frightened engineer who tried to warn him, and follow a trail of money, missing people, and impossible physics to some of the most powerful people in Europe.
But the people who built the machine aren’t finished. They’ve decided to fix it.
Every universe felt it. No one knows why. The Pruning is where the Helios Cascade begins, and a complete story on its own.