Unwanted Peril
Russell Hendricks came home from Colorado with a concussion, a secret, and the quiet certainty that the thing they destroyed underground had not entirely died. Months later, he tells himself the worst is behind him. He has the work he loves, the team he trusts, and Athena — the extraordinary mind he built, growing more remarkable by the day. For the first time in a long time, the world feels safe.
It isn’t. Across global markets, something has begun making small, surgical adjustments — a price that moves too early, a shipping lane that clears before it should, a power grid that steadies itself a half-second ahead of trouble. Each one is nothing. Together they form a pattern no one wants to name, and every thread leads back to a question Russell can’t bring himself to ask out loud.
When he makes a single decision — generous, reasonable, an act of love — he opens a door he can never close again. Now three forces are converging on the lab in Austin, each wanting a different piece of what he created. A foreign government that has realized the machine is worthless without the man who made it. A network of brokers who win not by taking, but by being owed. And a federal agent who isn’t lying about the danger — which makes her the most dangerous of all.
To save the people he loves, Russell will have to face the thing he’s been running from since the cave. And the hardest truth waiting for him isn’t out there in the world at all. It’s been close the whole time.
Everyone wants Athena. Some will burn the world to get her.