Original AI-generated book

The Ninth Throat

About this book

For eleven centuries, humanity has crossed the dark through the Ladder — forty-three bone-white apertures hanging in deep space, each one wide enough to swallow a fleet. Nobody knows who built them. Nobody has needed to. Then the Throats begin to close, one every few years, and each closure strands worlds that cannot feed or breathe without ships. When the ninth aperture starts to ring its year-long warning bell, three people are pushed together on the salt world of Tallow: Rustam Kiyabe, sixty-two, a famous pilot with a rebuilt porcelain jaw and a legend he assembled himself; Havilah Ondiek, an engine-priest of the Order of the Patient Hand who has spent her life tuning hymns into machines she believes she understands; and Sixth-Voice-of-Amberlight, a nineteen-year-old translator grown inside the closing gate, who speaks in the borrowed voices of the dead. A smuggler with a sister in bond, a marshal with a thirty-year grudge, and the most charming man in the Terrace Concord all want the same expedition to sail to the Cradle at the network's origin — and all want it to end differently. What they find there is not a machine, not a ruin, and not anyone's gift. It is a season. And the argument that follows — over what nine hundred worlds owe a species they have been riding for a thousand years — will be settled not by the man everyone is waiting for, but by the one person nobody thought to count. An epic of scale, appetite, politics and salt, about the difference between a legend and a life, and about what survives three hundred years after the doors shut.