Voidsong

Nadia Varga is a contact-linguist for a losing war, the one human alive who can hear the enemy’s deep-song for the language it is. Three years ago the Vhorn burned her colony to slag and started the war, and every child in the Coalition knows the name of the monster who gave the order: the Warbreaker, commander of the Deepsong Fleet. She lost everything at Sereda. She has spent every year since learning to read the tongue of the thing that took it.

So when the Coalition puts her aboard his flagship to translate his surrender, she goes ready to hate him. What she finds is not the monster the war stories promise. The Warbreaker is bound by a law his people cannot break: a bond made only by a freely-given voice, and that once made cannot speak a lie. He offers her that bond, tells her she can unmake it with a single word and walk out his airlock whenever she chooses, and means it. No one has ever handed her the truth and the door in the same breath.

And the truth is that his people never sent the order that burned Sereda. The kill-order that started the war is a forgery, a human cipher dressed in a stolen voice, and there is exactly one person in the settled reach with the craft to prove it. The man who wrote it is the one both worlds trust to end the war, the beloved envoy with clean open hands, who has been selling this war since the day her colony burned.

They think she is only the girl who reads the enemy’s noise. They have not understood yet that she knows what the noise is saying, that the monster they taught her to fear is the only one who has never lied to her, and that she has learned to want him more than she has ever wanted to be safe.

A standalone dark science-fiction romance with a guaranteed happily-ever-after. For adult readers.