This book contains no dragons. It does, however, contain individuals who Willow Ayers believes would benefit from the addition of some magical creatures. A broken marriage, a failed career, an abusive home: the people around Willow are trapped inside problems so isolating they can only be expressed by constantly changing tenses and writing styles. It is not the sort of book Willow would read; he prefers fantasy novels with consistent styles and happy endings.

But this is not a fantasy book, and Willow’s idea to bring about his own ‘happily ever after’ is crumbling. Decades ago, he saw the way humanity relied on so many flawed systems—Internet, GPS, cell phones, electronic banking—and created Unitime, the perfect system to unite all systems. Now his Satellites are malfunctioning, and what seemed an innocent glitch in technology might prove to be something darker, something infinitely more dangerous.

Even so, Willow believes people can overcome such things, even though it seems as unlikely as a book that starts in five different writing styles, but ends in just one.