Some people like crazy inventions in their sc-fi. Desirée Weatherspark's crew builds them for real - and something out past the edge of the campus has finally noticed. In a cluttered Cambridge workshop, Desirée "Dizzy" Weatherspark and her crew make impossible things: an exoskeletal flight suit grown from her late father's last designs, a guitar that channels raw vacuum energy through an alien crystal, a helm that lets you wear someone else's imagination like a coat. To her crew it's the best job on Earth. To everyone else it's a magic trick nobody's caught yet. Then the trick starts catching them. Something has learned to read the difference between what's pretended and what's true, and decided the line is up for grabs. When fiction starts bleeding through at the biggest fan convention of the year, the only people standing between a hall full of strangers and the things now wearing their costumes are a wheelchair-bound engineer with wings, a tinkerer who's never met a machine he couldn't talk into behaving, a shut-in genius fighting the whole war without leaving his chair, a guitarist chasing one impossible chord, and a cosplay army that showed up dressed for exactly this. Nobody asked them to be heroes. They were just the ones who knew how the trick worked. The Reality Engineers - a fast, funny, enormous-hearted novel about found family, borrowed magic, and running toward the thing everyone else runs from. Roll for initiative.