The Last Pilot of the Selk Narrows

About this book

For two hundred years the eleven frontier systems of the Calloway Reach have depended on one door: the Selk Narrows, a fold in space that lets a ship through only when one rare kind of human mind is at the helm. When the old pilot dies in his sleep, the traffic stops, the water runs short, and the Reach begins testing its children. Seventeen-year-old Nell Arrowsmith, who hides a stammer and fails every exam they give her, passes the only one that matters. Forty-one years and 7,912 crossings later, engineers have built a machine from recordings of her own flying, and they want her to sit beside it on one last run and sign away the need for her, and for every pilot after her. Before she agrees, she will have to learn what the man before her knew.