Some people inherit Ancestral Fragments — a physical and psychic bond with the great beasts of humanity’s past. In most, it sleeps. When it wakes, strength comes at the cost of the person carrying it.

A scientific megacorporation tried to turn that inheritance into soldiers. Its external stabilisation rig worked briefly, at a cost it could not sustain. A government seized the research. Then the systems were wiped and the paper burned. No one knows why.

A copy arrived, unexplained, on physicist Arthur Penhaligon’s desk. Working in secret, he found a way to detect carriers. With seven students, he made the restraint injectable: nanorobots built on their own DNA, preserving their minds and human bodies.

It is containment, not a cure. Every use of the power wears the system down. And in São Paulo, where the corporation still shapes ordinary life, the reasons to use it keep multiplying.