The Standing Wave · Companion
Forty thousand years before the Kairos reaches the dead world, a practice lineage called the Vel has spent six hundred years building toward a single completion. The practitioners must be ready. The civilization must hold together long enough. A waiting system must be initialized and left behind for whoever eventually arrives. One more person needs to reach it first.
Six centuries before its end, a civilization commits itself to a single unfinished task: a lineage of practitioners, the Vel, training toward a completion none of them will live to see start to finish. The work has a headcount and a deadline — three hundred and twelve people are needed, and the star their world depends on is not going to wait for them to be ready.
Vel is the story of what it takes to hold a civilization together long enough to finish something that will only mean anything forty thousand years later, to people who don't exist yet — the waiting system left behind, the last name added to the count, the door left open for whoever eventually walks through it in Between the Stars.
Best read alongside or after the trilogy that begins with Dark Passage — its payoffs land hardest once you already know what's waiting on the other side.
Vel is available now in paperback and eBook.