A 263-page literary science fiction novel.

One hundred thousand years ago, gardeners came down out of the sky and took a hundred thousand human beings to a green world twenty light-years away. Across a hundred millennia of slower gravity and gentler air, they became the Gerevians: a people who lived four and a half centuries, who built ships that folded space, and who, in the long arrogance of their late empire, destroyed their own home.

Eight hundred and forty-six survivors crossed the dark in four days and came to Earth as refugees in 1987. They built four hidden cities beneath four continents. They lived among us for thirty-four years without being seen.

Then, on a rainy October afternoon in 2021, a tall stranger knocked on a small wooden door in a fishing village in Western Australia, with a wet dog under his arm and a story that would take all night to tell.

Veronica Marsh listened to him.

This is what she heard.