On the far rim of our spiral, where starlight thins and everything rattles with cold, a salvage crew hooks a black ring that does not orbit anything. In its seams, they find a way into a civilization that stitched itself from galaxy to galaxy and then stepped away. What they carry out cannot be sold, and what it asks of them cannot be shared.
A brilliant urban systems engineer accepts a cerebral lattice to keep a drowning city alive. As the upgrade makes her sharper, faster, and unflinching, she begins to slip off the edges of what made her human: taste, grief, laughter that is not optimized for anything. The city hums, the models converge, and the last unquantified thing in her life becomes the only thing she can no longer afford.
In the heart of the terraformed Jupiter's moon, Europa, a crisis emerges that threatens the existence of its human colony. A colonist, Elara, rises to the challenge, driven by a personal vendetta and a desperate hope for survival.
In the cold expanse of space, humanity finally receives a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization. Dr. Aria Turner, a brilliant linguist and cryptographer, is tasked with decoding the cryptic message that holds the potential to change the course of human history.
