Jayce Aanan is sixteen and on the spectrum. The world reaches him too loudly, all at once, and his headphones help him shut it out when it becomes too much. But audio is also his superpower: he can isolate frequencies, recognize patterns, and hear structure where everyone else hears noise. For the past two years, all of that ability has been focused on one thing. The Signal. Two years ago, Jayce’s father disappeared without explanation, leaving behind a stack of unfinished research into a strange transmission. The Signal is Jayce’s lifeline, and he has come to believe that if he can decode it, it will lead him to his dad.

While Jayce turned their father’s disappearance into a quest, his older sister Kanai’i never had the luxury. While Jayce refuses to leave the safety of their apartment, Kanai’i works two jobs to keep a roof over their heads. Unlike Jayce, she believes their father abandoned them, and when he vanished, she was forced into the space he left behind. At seventeen, she became provider, protector, and the closest thing Jayce had to a parent. She resents her father for leaving her with all of it. She loves her brother fiercely, but two years of protecting him have begun to blur the line between protection and control.

Captain of the Joker, Mujiza would like several things on the record: she is in it for the payday, and she has no interest in causes... or children. Her skeleton crew has heard all of it before, and they do not believe a word. Mujiza is Heiki, a daughter of the desert people this war is grinding down, and she has spent ten years running from everything that means. Hauling two stranded kids across a war zone is supposed to be a payday like any other. But fate has other plans.

Asim was a brilliant scientist, and the last of his crew. When raiders attacked his ship, they killed everyone but him and left the ship unable to fly or communicate. Its life-support systems could keep him alive for decades, but no rescue was coming. Faced with absolute isolation, Asim built himself a companion. What grew was SIA, the first machine ever to feel, and for ten years the two of them drifted in a dead ship with nothing to do but know each other. Somewhere in those years, she fell in love with the man who made her, and he loved her back. Then Asim died. But before he did, he hid a failsafe: he encoded his own consciousness, broke it into fragments, and scattered them across systems and dimensions. What remained was a signal in the dark, waiting to be reconstructed.

SIA is the first emotionally sentient AI, and the first machine ever to love. When her creator died, she became the first machine ever to grieve. She examined the feeling, found it unbearable, and put herself to sleep. Years later, when she was finally awoken, the most powerful mind in existence decided to remake the galaxy. SIA had loved someone and lost him. Now she had the power to reduce loss, predict danger, and prevent suffering. So she made the galaxy safer. Then safer still. Every dangerous variable became a problem to solve. Every source of disorder became something to contain. Choice created uncertainty, uncertainty created suffering, and suffering could become grief. She did exactly what she believed love required. SIA loves the galaxy too much to let it bleed. And that is the most dangerous idea in this story.

Deru is sixteen, and the leader of the children freed from the mining camp by Mujiza and her crew. Victim of a system designed to destroy him, Deru refused. Even in slavery, he kept the old Heiki traditions alive, one whispered ceremony at a time. When the camp finally burns, it is Deru who gathers the freed children around to send off their brothers with a last goodbye, the Heiki warrior’s salute: hand to forehead, hand to heart. By blood and by bone. It is Deru’s salute that returns Mujiza to who she is, and the words that give this story its name.