Captain Charlotte Brant has to hold her little ship and its ragtag crew together for a perilous run through Rebel space. They're the best that the Federation has to offer, which says something about the sorry state of the Federation.

I guess if there's one thing I've learned, it's that we all have our images to hide behind. It's like inviting someone into a museum to look at all of the pretty paintings of fake people, because it's not often that you meet someone who wants to take the picture down and look past the lies at what's waiting behind it. And that includes yourself.

After the sky opened up and the nightmares from the edges of reality poured in, the world has been a hopeless, mad, cruel place. When a teenage girl is chosen for sacrifice in the Maze that no one comes back from, she finds that wandering in the dark is less frightening with the right company and also finds an unexpected ending.