The starship is at the bottom of an American lake. The whole internet is looking for it.
The crew of the ISV Fermi escaped 1944 with a repaired drive and a hard-won law of time travel - and still fell eighty-two years short of home. Now it's 2026, and hiding has been abolished. Satellites map every meter. Cameras own every street. A face that exists in no database is not invisible - it's a red flag.
This time they can't wait it out on an island. The rebuild needs the machinery of civilization itself: superconductors, cryogenics, precision fabrication. They must shop in the century that invented facial recognition - with no identities, no history, and no room for a single mistake.
Three hunters are already closing. A tech billionaire who grew up on her grandfather's impossible stories and quietly built a fortune's worth of sensors around one article of faith: they'll come back. A federal agent following physical evidence she refuses to explain with fairy tales. And the internet itself - forty thousand amateurs chasing a viral mystery, one teenager among them getting far too close.
In 1944, the danger was being found. In 2026, the danger is being identified - and one member of the crew is running out of time in a way no one can hide.
Exposure is the second novel of the Displacement trilogy.