Suddenly, every crystal around her began to hum at the same pitch. The frequency climbed past human hearing into something that felt like a needle behind her eyes. Her suit’s comm erupted with voices—her brother’s, her mother’s, her own as a child begging for a story. The ice fractured in concentric rings, revealing not rock or frozen gas, but chambers . Hallways. A city folded into the ruins of a dead planet.

In the far reaches of the Verge Sector, where nebulae bled colors no human eye had a name for, there existed a place the star charts simply called Kaysplanet .

Jorie killed her thrusters and let the Ephemeral drift. Outside her viewport, the ring stretched like a frozen river, littered with the skeletons of failed expeditions: a cargo freighter snapped in half, a research pod impaled on a shard of black crystal, and deeper in, the faded insignia of the Odyssey , the ship her brother had died on.

The ice trembled. All around them, the frozen bodies of dead explorers began to stir—not reanimated, but piloted , their suits moving as if filled with water instead of flesh.

Jorie didn’t cry. Crying in a suit is a waste of water. She used her laser to cut the slug free and slotted it into her suit’s reader.

But a new constellation had appeared in the Verge Sector: a ring of frozen tears, spinning slowly around a dwarf star.

Before she could parse the words, the ice beneath her feet groaned.

Decades ago, a rogue moon had torn through the system’s only habitable zone, shattering the serene, ocean world of Kay into a billion frozen teardrops. Now, all that remained was a dense ring of crystalline ice and silicate dust, orbiting a dwarf star that flickered like a dying candle. Scavengers, exiles, and fools called it home.