The Stitched World

Dalton Reyes was five inches into a twelve-inch stitch when the air pressure dropped. One second he's welding an overhead beam on a Tuesday morning retrofit in south Tucson. The next, the beam is gone and he's standing in scrubland that doesn't exist on any map, under a sky that's the wrong color, with a blue inscription floating in his vision telling him he has ten minutes to pick a class. Every human on Earth just got pulled into the Fracture — a ninety-day tutorial stitched together from fragments of other worlds. Dalton has his hood, his gloves, his leathers, and twelve years of reading steel for a living. He doesn't know fighting. He doesn't know fantasy tropes. He knows load paths, weld pools, and which tolerances actually matter. Turns out the lattice holding the multiverse together is just a very big weld. And Dalton is about to notice the seams.