December, 1925. Rural Virginia.

Fourteen-year-old Vincent “Fuse” Fusilier opens the barn door on a freezing morning—and finds a girl sleeping in the hay beside his miniature horse.

She is thin, exhausted… and silent.

Modern soldiers. Ancient war. Hannibal at the height of his power.

When a mission over Afghanistan goes catastrophically wrong, thirteen soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry are hurled out of the sky and into 216 BCE.

They land in the middle of Hannibal’s campaign against Rome.

Eleven years before Hannibal marched his army and war elephants over the Alps to attack Rome, a dying girl was thrown into a river and left to drown.

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Below a series of rapids, an enormous war elephant wades into the water and lifts her to safety with his powerful trunk.

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The elephant is Obolus — the largest and most feared war elephant in Hannibal’s army.

Thirty days.

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That's all Catalina Saylor has.

Twenty-two years old, drowning in debt, and working in a café to survive, Catalina has one last chance to change her future.

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When she earns a probationary position at Qubit's Incubator—a secretive innovation laboratory hidden inside a converted New York warehouse—she enters a world unlike anything she has ever imagined.