The Silent Meridian

For four hundred years, humanity has crossed the stars through the Meridian, a chain of ancient alien beacons, and the lightkeepers’ job is simply to keep them running.

Captain Amara Kesh is a disgraced former Navy ace, now flying a battered repair tender called the Wren. She has a secret: a burnt neural implant lets her hear the beacons sing.

When Beacon 117 begins to die with eleven thousand refugees on the wrong side, Amara breaks the oldest law in the Concordance and walks into its living Heart. What she finds there changes everything.

The beacons are not machines. They are Keepers, holding back a hunger that eats stars, and someone at the very top has been secretly draining them. Hunted by the Navy and branded a traitor, Amara flees into the Hush, a region gone dark for sixty years.

There she uncovers the truth about the crash that destroyed her career and the man who let her best friend die. Now the lights are going out one by one, and she has to teach a whole civilisation to listen before the dark reaches home.