Jori Vance does not want to be a soldier. He is one anyway, nineteen and unremarkable, surviving his conscription on a garrison moon where the Union is losing politely.
Ilse Okpara stitches soldiers back together and tells them the truth while doing it. When she pulls Jori off a table with a lung full of propellant, she informs him he is not allowed to die on her shift.
They get eleven days.
Then the front collapses, Jori's unit is cut off, and he starts walking-two hundred kilometers, four survivors, one radio. What he finds at the end of that walk saves four thousand people and costs him six weeks in a camp for telling the truth.
Ilse is sent somewhere worse for asking the wrong questions. She leaves with the answers.
Two people, two secrets, one station, one deal. The kind you make with your own name.
A galactic war romance about the small, stubborn distance between coming home and being sent back.
