The Crown of Glass doesn't hate anyone. It just does the math. And right now, the math says three worlds are acceptable weight.
The Crown is a civic weather machine older than every living government combined — and it's collapsing under corrupted burden logic, assigning heat death and pressure failure across Cinder Verge, Saints Lantern, and Breaker Shoal in a sequence no single node can interrupt alone. Quell wants to calibrate it. Rhun wants to file paperwork until it belongs to him. And somewhere inside a ship held together by debt and refusal, Rian Vale is finally done calling that neutrality.
The shard is dying. The cage is finished. The freighter can't make the next run. None of that changes the question Ione finally forces into the room: Are we counting people, or protecting them?
Chain Reaction is Book VIII of the Starwake Saga — a space opera about what happens when you've run out of good instruments and have to burn the last one anyway.
Cohl Marten writes science fiction built on one principle: every decision has a cost, and someone pays it. His work explores crews navigating unstable routes, damaged infrastructure, and systems that no longer behave the way they were designed to. With a focus on logistics, consequence, and human judgment under pressure, his stories replace spectacle with structure—and let the outcomes speak.View all by Cohl Marten
