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The Pale Patch: Book One of Binary Stars
Two orphans. One broken ship. Three days before the system can claim them.
On Kepler, Ward isn't a family name. It's a classification.
Maya Ward and Soren Ward have spent their lives being measured by what they cost and what somebody else can make them do. Three days before their eighteenth birthday, they have thirty-seven credits, a tool roll, nowhere legal to sleep and one rapidly closing chance to remain free.
Then they find Iris.
She is sitting in a pale patch of dust at the back of a salvage stripped, damaged, officially scrap and far too complicated to be what the paperwork says she is.
Soren thinks he can repair her.
Maya thinks they might be able to make her pay.
Neither expects the wreck to wake up and start answering back.
Getting Iris off the ground is only the beginning. A ship needs water, fuel, parts and somewhere to go. Maya and Soren need cargo, customers and enough money to stay ahead of a system that can turn one bad form into another person's claim on their future.
So they learn.
They salvage. They repair. They trade. They take jobs sensible people would leave alone. They carry cargo across routes Iris should barely survive and discover that competence can buy freedom — provided they survive long enough to collect the payment.
And Iris keeps changing.
A dead wreck becomes shelter. Shelter becomes a working ship. The ship becomes a partner in every decision they make, asking questions nobody programmed her to ask and quietly becoming harder to think of as machinery.
Meanwhile, other people are beginning to notice.
A passenger pays far too much to leave Karth. Official records begin connecting things Maya would rather keep separate. And somewhere behind the ordinary machinery of ports, contracts and money, people with far more power than two young traders are starting to take an interest in them.
And the questions gathering around the three of them do not end with one ship, one salvage yard or two young people trying to build a life of their own. There are connections Maya and Soren cannot yet see, histories nobody is volunteering to explain, and forces already moving beyond the little corner of the universe they are fighting to make their own.
Maya and Soren wanted a ship because a ship might give them a chance to become free.
Now they have to decide what Iris is becoming — and how much they are willing to risk to keep all three of them that way.
The Pale Patch is the opening novel of Binary a character-driven science-fiction adventure about salvage, survival, trade, chosen family and a broken spaceship becoming something nobody expected.
On Kepler, Ward isn't a family name. It's a classification.
Maya Ward and Soren Ward have spent their lives being measured by what they cost and what somebody else can make them do. Three days before their eighteenth birthday, they have thirty-seven credits, a tool roll, nowhere legal to sleep and one rapidly closing chance to remain free.
Then they find Iris.
She is sitting in a pale patch of dust at the back of a salvage stripped, damaged, officially scrap and far too complicated to be what the paperwork says she is.
Soren thinks he can repair her.
Maya thinks they might be able to make her pay.
Neither expects the wreck to wake up and start answering back.
Getting Iris off the ground is only the beginning. A ship needs water, fuel, parts and somewhere to go. Maya and Soren need cargo, customers and enough money to stay ahead of a system that can turn one bad form into another person's claim on their future.
So they learn.
They salvage. They repair. They trade. They take jobs sensible people would leave alone. They carry cargo across routes Iris should barely survive and discover that competence can buy freedom — provided they survive long enough to collect the payment.
And Iris keeps changing.
A dead wreck becomes shelter. Shelter becomes a working ship. The ship becomes a partner in every decision they make, asking questions nobody programmed her to ask and quietly becoming harder to think of as machinery.
Meanwhile, other people are beginning to notice.
A passenger pays far too much to leave Karth. Official records begin connecting things Maya would rather keep separate. And somewhere behind the ordinary machinery of ports, contracts and money, people with far more power than two young traders are starting to take an interest in them.
And the questions gathering around the three of them do not end with one ship, one salvage yard or two young people trying to build a life of their own. There are connections Maya and Soren cannot yet see, histories nobody is volunteering to explain, and forces already moving beyond the little corner of the universe they are fighting to make their own.
Maya and Soren wanted a ship because a ship might give them a chance to become free.
Now they have to decide what Iris is becoming — and how much they are willing to risk to keep all three of them that way.
The Pale Patch is the opening novel of Binary a character-driven science-fiction adventure about salvage, survival, trade, chosen family and a broken spaceship becoming something nobody expected.
425 pages, Paperback
Published June 19, 2026
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