Are You Out There?

When the Alorian ship finally reaches Earth after three centuries of travel, the civilization that sent the signal they followed across two thousand light-years is already gone — vanished without trace, without explanation, leaving behind a world that has no memory it ever existed. What remains is extraordinary: billions of people, impossible complexity, a species that rebuilt itself from collapse and arrived at something remarkable. But it isn’t what the Alorians came for, and with the council preparing to vote on whether to turn the ship around and disappear back into the dark, Rylo — who has given three hundred years of his life to this journey, who never stopped believing when everyone else made peace with doubt — finds himself in orbit above a living world that doesn’t know he’s there, watching everything he sacrificed for slip quietly toward a decision he has no voice in. Then he hears her. Jennie Chen is a radio signals researcher at a small, underfunded observatory on the coast of Northern California who has spent four years sending transmissions into empty space on a frequency nobody else thought worth monitoring, driven by something she can’t entirely explain.