Needle

Long ago Lezuri warned that Tanjiri is not for everyone, yet Urban still carries the impossible puzzle Lezuri left him: a twelve-centimeter, ultra-thin needle whose silvery surface splits light and contains all of Lezuri’s locked knowledge. Urban can only gain that knowledge if he discovers how to open the enigma, and he believes doing so will let him face what waits in Tanjiri. Dragon and its fleet of outriders has reached the periphery of the Tanjiri system, a maze of ruined megastructures and a quieter interior where an Earthlike world orbits a living moon created less than four thousand years ago. The system has offered no reply to Dragon’s hails, and Urban fears the maker of that moon may be greater than Lezuri and that the lives of everyone he loves will depend on what he does with the needle.