They took her. The only way to fight them is to carry your weapons inside your body.
When creatures from a parallel dimension begin freezing humans in place—translucent, slowly dying, trapped between life and death—the world builds fences around its victims and moves on. Jace Meyer can't. His fiancée Crystal was taken in an instant, and a timer beside his bed counts down the years until she's gone.
Recruited into a prototype unit training civilians to cross into the creatures' world, Jace discovers the brutal catch: only living tissue survives the crossing. Every weapon has to be built inside the soldier's body—implanted, cultivated, carried beneath the skin. He spends years in brutal transformation alongside grieving parents, desperate partners, and retirees with nothing left to lose—and slowly realizes the institution rebuilding him sees his body, his consent, and his love as assets to be spent.
When he finally crosses over—naked, armed with weapons inside his own flesh—he'll face the creature that took Crystal. And the question he can no longer avoid: What kind of man comes back from a place like that?
