PROLOGUE:
The Signal
The stars weren’t supposed to be moving.
Riven Marlowe sat in her command chair aboard The Thorne, bare feet up on the console, eyes half-lidded as the nav maps updated with another empty drift coordinate. She’d been crawling this dead quadrant for three weeks now, chasing nothing. No signals, no wrecks, no wreckers. Just cold silence.
And yet… the stars were wrong.
Not in a way most people would notice. But Riven had spent years in deep space, and she knew orbital drift when she saw it. Something was off. Slight curvature anomalies around Exoplanet Vel Crys—a dead gas giant surrounded by radiation storms and decades of red-flag warnings.
“The fuck are you hiding out here?” she muttered.
Mother, her onboard AI, said nothing. It had been glitching since they crossed the border into the uncharted zone. Power fluctuations. Mild system lag. Audio static that whispered things just below the audible threshold.
She was used to deep-space psych tremors. They came with solitude, trauma, memory. What she wasn’t used to was this:
Incoming signal: UNKNOWN ORIGIN.
The screen lit up. Just a single tone—subsonic, deep enough to make her stomach flutter. Then another. Then—
A voice.
Not one voice.
Many.
It hissed, echoed, folded in on itself like language run through itself until it became nothing but need.
“…ven…lo…lo—riven…”
Her name.
Her name inside it.
The signal was full of static, buried under frequencies no human system should’ve been able to parse. But her name came through again, this time clearer—like it had been learning how to say it.
“Riven Marlowe.”
You hear us now.
She sat up, spine taut.
The screen flickered—showing a coordinate range in Quadrant 4-Zero-Black. No beacon. No transponder. Just a presence. Something there. Waiting.
She should’ve ignored it.
She should’ve archived the signal, sent a ping to the nearest authority, and burned thrusters away at full speed.
Instead, she leaned forward. Her tongue wet her lips. She keyed in the course manually.
“Alright then,” she whispered. “Let’s see what you want.”
The moment she hit execute, The Thorne responded like a lover startled from sleep. Lights dimmed. Power rerouted. Fuel flowed toward thrusters before she even confirmed. Like the ship had already decided.
No. Not the ship.
Something in the ship.
Something already here.
The main display blinked once. Then again.
For a second—just one—she saw the stars ripple.
As if space had inhaled.
“Course set,” the AI said in a flat voice that didn’t sound like Mother at all.
Riven watched as the derelict came into view—a long, black wound stitched against the velvet of the void.
Her nav lights flickered.
You’re already inside, the voice whispered.
