Cara Artell arrived at the recruitment clinic broken and bleeding, her husband's boots still echoing down the corridor behind her. One whispered word, and she became something new. Cara is transformed with alloy limbs, a Guardia's tattoo, and a sisterhood willing to die for her.

A fragile peace is fracturing along old fault lines. Somewhere in the system's shadows, humans are disappearing. Not to culls this time, but to something quieter and far more insidious. When Cara uncovers a conspiracy that reaches across species and into the heart of the command she serves, it costs her the one person she had left.

Stranded in far space with her best friend and fellow recruit, two bounty hunters and a ship that moves like it thinks, Cara begins to feel something she can't explain. A grief that isn't hers, warmth that comes from the hull, a presence reaching out from inside the engines. The ship AEVIS shouldn't be able to communicate. And yet.

With allies as flawed as they are fierce, Cara is carrying more than she knows. The war — the whole fragile, system-wide ceasefire — balances on one thing: returning AEVIS to command. Entire fleets are waiting on that decision. Entire worlds. But the ship keeps doing things ships shouldn't do.

Cara tells herself grief does strange things to a person.

She isn't wrong.

A character-driven space opera about bodily autonomy, found family, and the terrible cost of being someone's engine of change.