**BENEATH A STARLESS SKY** *Seven years gone. The sky remembers nothing.* --- Kael Veyr wakes to darkness — not the darkness of night, but the darkness of a sky with no Sun at all. Seven years have passed since he volunteered for a classified experiment at thirteen years old, and the world that put him under is gone: his mother dead, his sister erased from every record on Earth, the facility around him reduced to dead relays and old recordings left behind by people who never came back for him. There is no one to explain what happened. No guide, no voice in his ear — only warning lights that flicker on for reasons he has to guess at, and fragments of audio logs recorded by staff who are long gone, including pieces of his own father's voice, left behind like a message in a bottle no one expected anyone to find. Something else woke up with him. A duplicate, wearing his face, his voice, his memories — and seven years of solitude standing guard over a massive containment ring buried beneath the facility. It calls him traitor. It calls him brother. It won't say which one is the truth. Above them both, something vast has finally finished crossing the dark between the stars, descending toward a planet that has no more Sun to warm it. It isn't a comet. It isn't a ship. It has a shape Kael recognizes in his nightmares, and it is looking for him by name. Piece by piece, alone, Kael has to reconstruct what he did the night he disappeared — what his father sacrificed to protect him, what his sister Mira gave up when she went in after him, and why the last words he ever wrote to himself were a warning not to trust his own reflection. The Void is not coming. It has already arrived. And it remembers everything Kael was never allowed to.