The galaxy calls them monsters. Her daughter calls them family.
Fifteen years after the scarabs destroyed Fathomscape Station, their home world has finally been found.
Janice's youngest daughter, Kalithee, is the only Dor'ecki maggot in known space—gentle, artistic, and raised on stories about the beautiful civilization of her lost people. But everyone else who has ever crossed paths with the Dor'ecki remembers only the scarabs: metal-winged, bulletproof, and the reason half of Janice's family is dead.
Now warships are converging to wipe the Dor'ecki out for good, and Kalithee's window to meet her own people is closing fast. Janice has spent fifteen years telling her daughter that her people could be beautiful. Now she has to decide if she believes it enough to bet her family's lives on it.
What they find underground is a civilization out of a dream: cathedral caverns lit by rivers of fireflies, scarab-back riders, and shrine halls hung with painted wings preserving the faces of the honored dead. It's everything Janice promised her daughter. It's everything she feared.
And it will cost her more than she ever agreed to pay.
The Xeno-Spectre trilogy reaches its devastating conclusion in a story of first contact, found family, and the terrible cost of hope. For readers of Becky Chambers and Adrian Tchaikovsky, with the terror of Alien and the aching wonder of Arrival.
