The Debt Collector at the Edge of Stars

Every dead star leaves a debt. Someone has to collect it. When a star burns out before fulfilling its obligations — warming planets, anchoring gravity lanes, guiding ships through the dark — it leaves behind a Stellar Debt. The Bureau of Unresolved Cosmic Obligations exists to pay those debts, using Collectors: rare humans who can absorb a dead star's energy and channel it to finish what the star couldn't. Ashe Morren is sixteen years old, the Bureau's best Collector, and projected to live to fifty-two. She's resolved sixty-three debts. Each one costs her weeks of her life. She is not stopping. But the Aries Sector case has sat unresolved for 847 days — a dying world, 2.3 million people watching their soup float off the table, and a classified file that every Bureau archivist pretends doesn't exist. When Ashe forces her way into the restricted archive, she finds a fifty-year conspiracy: someone has been deliberately killing stars. Building something. At the edge of the Uncharted Reach, in the dark where unresolved debts accumulate, a structure is almost complete. It needs one more thing. It needs her. The glow in Ashe's right arm has been spreading for four months. It's reached her shoulder now. It isn't residual energy from the sixty-three debts she's resolved. It's a dead star that has been living in her blood since before she was born. It's been waiting.