What if the universe is just a house of cards, and we live on the top floor?

Camber Maypole awakens a third time, 350 years after the first. But she never asked for immortality or to become the fixer for the remnant of humanity huddled on the distant moon, Varanasi. Still, she is curious. Will they survive? And if not, who or what will take their place?

Between crumbling infrastructure, depleted food stores, and a fractured family, Seraph Stone is weighed down by leadership. The colony’s only prisoner calls upon him wearing his wife’s face and he’s given yet another impossible choice: risk his people once more or leave his wife’s stolen body to rot in prison.

When an unnatural creature is found aboard the colony ship, Vera Rubin, Seraph pulls Maypole from a simulation and tasks her with finding out who made it and how it got there. But Maypole’s software is at least a century out of date, and she is not the woman she used to be. The last thing she remembers from her fall from simulated life into death and rebirth is a vision of Varanasi being consumed, atom by atom, by a great maw of fire.

One thing is clear, there is more going on aboard the Vera Rubin than Seraph ever thought possible. He and Maypole must work together again to save not only the colony, but reality itself.