THE FARTHER SHORE

The road is ending, and the fuel is counted to the last decimal.

When Petra Voss closes the fleet's ledger, one figure remains: 0.48 — forty-eight hundredths of a month's full burn for seven ships and some eighty-five thousand people. Enough to maneuver. Not enough to go back. So the council adopts the Cold Account: every burn the fleet will ever make, spent on paper before any of it is spent in fact.

What follows is an arrival flown the way the road was flown — as written, or not at all. The ships take their stations in orbit one by one. An uncrewed boat tests the way down. A survey party reads the ground and brings back hard news with the good: the water is not yet certified, the surveyed region is smaller than the hope, and the descent will run by lot, family by family, over months. On the ground, a chapel rises. In orbit, Selah Hale — the Keeper, who will never stand on the world she helped them reach — keeps her post by ear and answers the morning office from the sky: the office is listening; go on down.

Behind them, the world they left keeps its own counsel. Above them, the watcher keeps its station at the edge of everything, unidentified. And under their boots, for the first time in two hundred and thirty-five days, there is ground.

"They hunt the light. We carry it."

The Farther Shore is Book Three of The Pilgrim Fleet, following The Eaten Stars and The Lantern Road.

Written from a Christian worldview — Scripture first.