A murdered cryptographer. A puzzle box wired to a machine that was never meant to exist. A town caught between the heartbeat of reality and the people trying to rewrite it.When Special Investigator Mara Ibarra arrives at the scene of a brilliant cryptographer's death, she finds one impossible clue: a Sumerian-stamped puzzle box tied to a long-buried experiment known only as the Ur-Engine-a device capable of bending memory, altering perception, and reshaping events that should be fixed.Someone resurrected the machine.Someone used it.And someone is willing to kill to protect the last surviving piece.The trail leads Mara to Dryden Ridge, a quiet town humming with a wrongness no one can explain. People lose minutes. Conversations loop. Shadows fall in the wrong direction. And at the center of it all is Alyssa Kline, an eleven-year-old girl whose mind the engine cannot predict-and whose existence may be the last variable the machine cannot control.With a rogue researcher tearing holes in the lattice of cause and effect, an underground syndicate hunting the puzzle box, and a world beginning to fracture at the edges, Mara must navigate a reality where evidence lies, time listens, and no one is ever entirely themselves.The first mistake built the machine.The second was letting it wake.Perfect for fans of Blake Crouch, Michael Crichton, and Dark Matter, Relic Cipher launches a gripping new sci-fi thriller series where memory, identity, and fate collide-and one field team stands between humanity and the future it never chose.