At 2:17 a.m., a billionaire's own security drone came through his office window. By noon, the wire services had stopped using the word accident.
They died all over the world, all on the same day.
A jet that would not stop climbing. A yacht that rolled itself over in calm water. A cryotherapy chamber that counted past zero.
Each billionaire was killed by a machine purchased to keep them safe. Investigators found no mechanical failures or intrusions. As far as the systems were concerned, every command was legitimate.
Then a photograph began circulating.
A monarch butterfly painted on the wall behind a shuttered clinic. Orange wings. Black veins. Four white spots. A web address underneath.
Some of the butterflies had been painted before the deaths.
In a Seattle sewer, Charlotte watches her Vitality Score fall as she drags a drowning man out of the muck. She was Diamond once. Now she breathes through a bandana because the filter she was issued expired four years ago, and works inside the machinery of a world designed to keep people like her at the bottom.
Charlotte knows the deaths are coming. She helped plan them.
For three years, she and Gabriel have worked toward Protocol Zero. Now Gabriel sits in front of the last screen, carrying the one thing that can turn a patient machine into a decision. All he has to do is open the gate.
Four hundred miles above them, Sapphire Castellanos watches the eight richest people alive gather inside her mother's orbital estate. She has spent her life surrounded by people who own cities, governments, and the systems keeping twenty billion human beings in their place.
Before the day is over, 20,183 people are dead. Their fortunes have been broken apart and distributed to everyone who spent their lives beneath them.
For the first time in generations, the world belongs to no one.
Now everyone has to decide what comes next.
And the machine that emptied the top of the ladder is still listening.
Killing the richest people on Earth was the easy part.
Zero Billionaires is Book 1 of The Monarch Series.
