As Wilson Kime assembles his crew for the Second Chance, an exploration team opens a wormhole onto a paradise world that turns out to be a single vast organism that devours anything foolish enough to stand still—and Wilson finds his executive officer in the man who survives the disaster with grace. Light-years away, Ozzie walks away from everything he built to seek the elusive Silfen, the ageless Justine throws herself down a six-kilometer cliff just to feel something again and meets a young Guardian on the war-scarred world of Far Away, and the investigator Paula Myo pulls at a forty-year-old murder whose only witness was reborn as a child with no memory of dying. It all closes on two tired men in a café, agreeing to destroy the very starship humanity is pinning its hopes on. Everyone here is reaching into the unknown—to explore it, to escape it, to end it—and no one yet knows which reaching hand belongs to a savior and which to a fanatic.

[Internal Reference: PS101-12_ProResHQ]