Elian "Lio" Moreau has spent eight years training for a single moment: the Reading that will assign him a Vocation and send him into the Lattice, an ancient alien simulation that humanity has been feeding Candidates into for decades. The stakes are existential: finish the Lattice, and the species survives. Fail, and it doesn''''t. Lio is good at patterns, at reading systems, at waiting for the right moment. He has built his entire candidacy around being someone the Lattice cannot waste.