Cross the planet, wake her partner, come back alive.

To the rest of the Solar System, Pharus is an uninhabited planet with a self-sustaining Beacon stationed at each pole. Each Beacon guides traveling ships through the planet’s treacherous gravity and slingshots them deeper into the System. However, at the northern and southern stations, a single keeper lives in isolation, connected to the other only by radio. For fifty years at a time, they enter cryosleep, waking for a single year to tend to and repair their respective Beacons. 

After a seemingly normal cryocyle, the southern keeper, Theta, wakes to find her partner’s Beacon has fallen silent, and his cryotube has malfunctioned. She must cross the planet, a perilous and unprecedented journey, confronting past traumas and unearthing hidden secrets buried for centuries in her quest to wake Axis.

Meanwhile, brother and sister Valerius and Valentina crash-land on Pharus in search of their friend, who has been falsely accused of treason by their father, the Chancellor Absolute. As the characters’ paths cross, they form a tentative truce and journey across the planet. But all is not as it seems on Pharus. Beliefs are challenged, foundations are shaken, and it seems the planet itself is designed to thwart them at every turn.

What secrets lie beneath the planet’s surface? What dangers lurk at the top? And what is that creeping feeling of impending dread crawling up the spine that none of them can seem to shake?