In another world, someone exists who looks like Neris Hawthorne.
But she isn’t Neris. She is an Echo.

When a strange detail appears in one of her photographs, Neris follows it to a discovery she cannot explain: a crossing into another world called Meath.

What she finds there unsettles her.

In Meath, another woman moves through the world with Neris’s face and instincts, shaped by a different life under a different sky. The people of Meath call these counterparts Echoes—lives that resonate across worlds without ever being the same.

But Meath is beginning to fracture. The living systems that hold the planet together are weakening, and creatures long buried beneath its surface are starting to break through.

The world of Meath is entering its final trial by fire.
Jaz Robinson refuses to let its people burn alone.

When Neris Hawthorne crossed between worlds, she believed the hardest part was behind her. Then Callen vanished into the ash and fire of an uninhabitable planet, and the living consciousness beneath Meath began to fail.

Nine months later, Callen is back. But the man who returned from the ash world is not the one she lost, and Neris is running out of ways to reach him.

While Neris fights to hold on to the person she loves, her fiercest friend Jaz Robinson is standing before the Protectorate — an order older than memory that decides which civilizations deserve to survive and which are left to die with their worlds. Jaz has never been good at accepting someone else's verdict.

Meath has less than a year. The relocation to Kai'ana, a young living world still finding its footing, is their only chance. But survival means leaving everything behind. And the new world they are building holds something none of them anticipated.

They are not alone.

Kaiʻana was supposed to be a refuge.

But the ocean world is not empty.

Ancient beings move beneath its waters, curious about the newcomers who now walk their shores. No one knows whether they come as guardians or something far more dangerous.

And while the settlers struggle to understand the Others, a former ally is preparing to become their greatest enemy.