The vibrations filled his chest, buzzed through his skull, and poured out through his voice, like a wind funneled through rock. He sang a note, easily and gently, and he vanished into the moment—into the resonance—he couldn’t hear the rest of the harmony very well, but he felt it, the formlessness of it, and it filled him with pure, unthinking sensation.
The resonance died smoothly down again, and Munir’s voice with it. He felt much better, awake, livelier, as though the sound had cleaned something out of him and set him down fresh. All echoes of last night’s sickness had vanished.
Lying in the plush bed of a villa on an illegal estate on an unsettled planet, in the quiet of dawn, Munir felt a seed of cold fear blossom in his heart.
What was that? And why did it only happen to him?
Munir is an agent of the Buschil government’s Office of Conflict Resolution. His official purpose is simply to make certain that difficult situations conclude without violence. Four claimants—a quadrillionaire, a mining company, a settler colony, and a scientific research group—argue for supremacy on a lush, newly-discovered exoplanet with a total population of nineteen. The negotiation is civil for now, but there’s no telling how long that will last. Munir has also been secretly tasked to manipulate all claimants into losing interest in the planet, in order to preserve it for some undisclosed but highly illegal purpose by the government itself.
One unforeseen complication makes both tasks difficult: a bizarre natural phenomenon unique to the planet which, for some reason, only seems to affect Munir.
Living with a small group of strangers in a luxurious, illegal estate on an unsettled planet, with little real authority, few resources, and only a vain hope that his strange reaction to being on the planet’s surface isn’t dangerous to his health, Munir is wholly unprepared for just how horribly wrong this assignment will go.
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