Chapter One: The Silent Meteor Shower

At 12:17 a.m., the entire city of Linjiang lost one second of sound. Cheng Ye would replay that second many times afterward. Tires on the elevated highway stopped whispering over asphalt. The refrigerator ceased its hum. A baby's cry upstairs was cut cleanly at the root. Only the sky continued to move. Hundreds of pale meteors climbed upward against the clouds, as if some force were drawing the city's lights back into space. Then all the sound crashed down at once. His phone vibrated on the desk. Cheng Ye was revising his résumé for the seventeenth time. Three months ago, he had been a senior app-testing engineer at Canopy Technologies. Now the phrase serious breach of confidentiality spread across his employment history like mold.