A dying universe.

When the Home worlds finally achieved the technology to venture out into the stars, they found a graveyard of dead civilizations, a sea of lifeless gray planets and their ruins. What befell them is unknown. All Home knows is that they are the last civilization left in the universe, and whatever came for the others will come for them next.

A search for answers.

Scout is an Archivist tasked with scouring the dead worlds of the cosmos for their last gifts: interesting technology, cultural rituals—anything left behind that might be useful to the Home worlds and their survival. During an excavation on a lifeless planet, Scout unearths something unbelievable: a surviving message from an alien who witnessed the world-ending entity thousands of years ago.

A past unraveled.

Blyreena was once a friend, a soul mate, and a respected leader of her people, the Stelhari. At the end of her world, she was the last one left. She survived to give one last message, one final hope to the future: instructions on how to save the universe.

An adventure at the end of a trillion lifetimes.

With the fate of everything at stake, Scout must overcome the dangers of the Stelhari’s ruined civilization while following Blyreena’s leads to collect its artifacts. If Scout can’t deliver these groundbreaking discoveries back to the Archivists, Home might not only be the last civilization to exist, but the last to finally fall.

This book was unexpectedly emotional for me, while at the same time being an incredible adventure about two siblings, Kieran and Scout, who are Archivists: basically, information archaeologists who fly through the galaxy collecting ancient knowledge their home world can benefit from.

The sibs, and their space cat, Pumpkin (he has his own little spacesuit!) are on a mission and well stocked with pizza as they land on a world for a seemingly routine exploration and retrieval, when they stumble across a universe-ending threat and a bread-crumb trail of clues left by a long-dead leader.

A rival company is trying to outrace Scout and Kieran to the next cache of information and hold it for ransom, but the data inside might very well be the only thing to save the universe.

It’s a book about memory, loss, and how far one is willing to go to save the ones they love. Absolutely a must read.