A bounty hunter on a journey to kill his own murderer slowly falls in love with a bug-alien scholar. When their partnership reveals clues to the long-lost history of humanity, the bounty hunter must accept that there’s more to life—and to himself—than violence.
Death! Rebirth! Revenge! Queer romance! Unlearning the internal toxicity of common cowboy stereotypes! This book is DONE and out querying agents right now! Here’s a look at the three major players:
Glicht Aarvam
Sure, I recognize that whatever on Khala’s shell Dawn actually is, it saved my life. More than that, it brought me back from the dead. But that don’t mean I’m obligated to enjoy what it’s done to me, and by sight it don’t mean I’m obligated to think highly of it. The thing is more stupid than it is smart, and its sparing my life more than anything foretells that.
A bounty hunter by trade, Glicht has led a long life of emotional ups and downs, getting better at his profession with every bullet dodged. Recently, he’s fallen into an apathetic rut that he can’t name the source of; so when he discovers within himself a deep hatred for murderer and gang leader Tek Slonden, he leaps on the feeling and devotes his life to hunting Slonden down.
When that devotion results in the deaths of hundreds, however, Glicht needs to face what he’s become. But Slonden is still out there, so that will have to wait; in the meantime, he’ll just lie to himself until his gun hand stops shaking.
Lohak
Oh, no, it’s very straightforward for me. There’s simply nothing I could have been other than a scholar. Nothing. I’m always asking questions—my mother likes to say that my first word was a question. I grew up reading books and getting thrown out of classrooms for challenging the teacher. Of course I would latch onto the world’s biggest mystery, wouldn’t I? Where else would I be?
A member of the zhel species, which is the dominant species on the planet Khala where our story takes place, Lohak has a leaf-green carapace, four arms, and an unmatched zest for knowledge. So, as soon as he found out that no one really knew where humans came from five hundred years ago, he dove straight into the deep end of the mystery and started digging.
When hundreds of people are killed in a disaster during his excavation, Lohak gets separated from the rest of his team and winds up tagging along with a human bounty hunter for safety. His new partner is terse, interesting, and alluringly actionable rather than calculative, and it isn’t long before Lohak falls completely in love.
There are a lot of things he doesn’t know about Glicht, however; and despite considering himself clearheaded and logical, Lohak is determined to believe that his team all made it home safely. All he needs to do is catch up with them.
Dawn
I do not want. My purpose is to keep [humans] healthy. You were the first to come within my sight since I lost memory.
Dawn is a ‘doctor machine’ buried beneath the place where Lohak’s team was digging. When Glicht gets himself killed along with hundreds, he happens to cross paths with it, which enables it to resuscitate him.
Although it has lost contact with its main store of memories, Dawn is clearly a link between the present and the ancient past–the target of Lohak’s research. And, now that Glicht is dependent on Dawn for survival, so is he.
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