Chapter 7

In the drifting orbital city of Votka, Ember Delacroix scavenges the wrecks of a dead war. She is good at it, and good at staying unnoticed.

Then she brokers a salvage contract that drops her into the lap of Kael, a defected pilot, and a battered freighter named the Cinder Wasp. Their cargo: a single encrypted beacon.

The cold came through the wall like a patient visitor, settling in the stone the way it always did this time of year, finding the cracks it remembered from the last season.

She pressed the flat of her hand against the door and listened. There was a rhythm to the quiet out here, a slow breath held between the pines, and she had learned to read it the way other people read a ledger.

Everything was where she had left it. The kettle, the ledger, the stack of letters tied with a length of gray ribbon. And yet something in the room was tilted, the way a room feels after a long travel.

It began, as these things usually do, as an ordinary question with an ordinary price. But the answer, when it finally came, did not fit in the shape she had made for it.

The beacon is singing. It is singing in a language the Empire burned to make everyone forget — and it is asking a question.