The Mars Frequency

The comm hub runs all night, and Wren Calloway runs with it.

A year after she lost everything, she has a place now: Sector 22, two hundred people, a settlement that works because she keeps it working. She has Cole. She has a job reading the signals that cross a dying sky. What she does not have, she tells no one about. On the night shifts, alone in the green glow, she filters one narrow band of static from forty million miles away, and she listens.

Then the static answers.

Two pulses. A pause. Two pulses. The pattern of a hand tapping a shoulder twice, the private signal of a family that no longer exists, arriving from Mars on the frequency of the machines Earth shipped away. Buried inside it is a serial number Wren memorized in a living room that is now underwater. UNIT 7. Seven.

It could be a message. It could be noise she has bent into the shape of hope, because hope is the one thing she has never been able to fix. There is only one way to know: build something that can answer, and send two pulses back into the dark.

But a signal is a risk, and the people who run the sky do not forgive unauthorized voices. Reaching for Mars means turning away from Sector 22, from Cole, from the girl she is trying to become. The closer Wren listens, the harder she has to decide what she is really chasing, and what it will cost the people still standing in front of her.

How far can you reach toward what you lost before you vanish from what you have left?

Book Two of The Calloway Signal.