Livro onde o personagem principal é um mercenário e há flashbacks sobre uma sandbox

Parece bastante com o de Nick Harkaway O mundo desaparecido - ele se encaixa nos mercenários e pelo menos em algumas informações de spoilers.

The book is a science fiction epic with elements of comedy and nuclear holocaust fiction. It tells the story of the unnamed main character and his best friend Gonzo Lubitsch and their experiences during and after "The Go-Away War", a conflict that reduces the world population to 2 billion. The "go-away bombs" and similar weapons used by the belligerents were designed to simply make anything and anyone subjected to them cease to exist, leaving no carnage or wreckage behind. The weapons, however, produced an unanticipated after effect. The matter that had "gone-away" was still there but merely stripped of the information which formerly differentiated and defined it. This "Stuff", as it is called, floats around the world in great storms and pools in various locations. When it comes into contact with people, a process referred to as "reification" occurs. The Stuff takes the form of whatever those present are thinking about. The results are often horrific. Apparitions, as well as whole individual persons, appear out of nothing. These people become known as "the new". To combat the Stuff, the war's survivors rely upon a substance called "FOX" which is produced by Jorgmond, a corporation that, for all intents and purposes, functions as the only governmental authority by virtue of the constant and universal need for their product. It is delivered through "the Jorgmund pipe", which snakes around the globe and permits the population to live in a thin ribbon of habitable land banded on either side by wasteland.

The story begins with the characters in the "Nameless Bar", a title that is a reference to the main character's namelessness. The company they work for, the Haulage & HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company is hired by Jorgmund to deal with power failures and a fire that has broken out on the Jorgmund pipe itself, endangering the "backbone" of their world and their very existence. As the company sets off, the unnamed protagonist starts thinking about his past, from the day he first met Gonzo. It recounts his relationship with Elizabeth Soames, whom he meets as a youth studying martial arts under the tutelage of Master Wu. Wu's school, the Voiceless Dragon is the mortal enemy of the Society of the Clockwork Hand. The struggle between the two eventually converges with the protagonist's efforts to oppose the misdeeds of Jorgmund in the Go-Away War's aftermath.