Hollow Dark

She stopped reaching. It reached back.

Sera Voss has reached the fourth layer. What she found there isn't a wall - it's a signal. Three hundred and twelve years old, patient, continuous, and aimed at something it has been calibrating toward for longer than the station has existed.

She is beginning to think that something is her.

Meanwhile, the Concord has opened an oversight review of her capabilities. The mechanism is self-reinforcing - object to the oversight and the objection becomes evidence for the review. Ronan Blackwell has a legal window, a three-year observation record, and exactly one move left. He has fourteen days to file it.

Two clocks. One is a legal deadline. One is the Fade's leading edge, eighteen months from the station's heart.

They have been working toward the same depth without knowing the other was doing the same - he from the outside, reaching below the warmth in the dark of the training yard; she from inside, calibrating in the chamber session by session, letting the signal come to her rather than reaching toward it. Neither of them said what they were finding. Both of them filed it under something they didn't name.

The signal has been transmitting for three hundred years. It was waiting to be read. She arrived at the moment both signals had been pointing toward.

Hollow Dark is the third book in the Greyhollow series - a dark academia fantasy about two people working toward the same thing in parallel, a legal battle fought in paperwork and precedent, and a signal that has been calibrating toward a reader for three centuries.

For readers of The Atlas Six, Babel, and Ninth House.