Head peace officer Anya Savelova believed her people, living on a hostile planet in the ice-bound city of Novayarkha, were the last of humanity.

Until the day she learned they weren't.

When a starship from an Earth thought long dead appears in orbit over her world, Anya imagines an explosion of possible futures, offering her people the freedom to transcend the limiting environment of the planet they'd thought was their last refuge. In the starship's crew, Anya finds creativity, diversity, innovation-all things the colony has had to inhibit to survive.

Seeing her world through the eyes of the starship crew makes Anya look closer at her city's inconsistencies, oddities she's always been told to ignore. But the harder she pushes at the pieces that don't fit, the more her government perceives the strangers as a threat. There are secrets in Novayarkha, hiding in plain sight, that the strangers can't possibly understand-and Anya's drive to uncover them risks shredding the fragile web holding together everything she's ever known and loved.