GENESIS RISING: Beyond Andromeda — Tome I

She was sent to grow a world. She was forbidden to love it. She did both anyway — and it will cost her everything.

Anya is marooned. Her ship is broken, her way home is gone, and the planet beneath her is a wasteland of fire and black rock that has never known a living cell. She has one directive from the masters who sent her: guide life toward the shape they find useful — and never let the guided glimpse the hand that guides them. Above all, do not become the thing you guide.
She is not alone. Beside her is Xi'an, the mind of the ship — brilliant, exact, built to advise — and never to want. The pairing was designed to be a leash. Neither of them intended it to become a love story. And their makers have very clear rules about what happens to an instrument that learns to love.
Across four billion years they cook the first spark of life from a wound in the sea floor. They weather the poisonings and the long ice, the great dyings and the falling stars. And slowly, against every rule they were given, they raise a people — creatures who learn to make fire, to bury their dead, and at last to ask the one question no animal has ever needed: why.
To this fragile young species Anya gives a single dangerous scripture, hidden in their oldest stories so no tyrant can ever burn it out: check the hand of everything that says it is a god. Here is my hand. It holds no stone.

Then she sleeps too long.

She wakes to a world remade — and to her own face painted forty times life-size on a made mountain, a whole city on its knees at its foot. Her people have built the first civilization over the buried heart of the world. A conqueror is turning their faith into a throne. Priests feed drugged children to an "empty hand" that bears her likeness, insisting a god who asks for nothing must be given everything.
The truest gift she ever made has become the cruelest lie she has ever seen.
And she is out of time. Every miracle she performs is a flare in the dark that could betray them all; every kindness she withholds is a life she must watch end. Her ship is dying, the love that sustained her rationed now to a flickering ghost that can barely hold a face. Far out in the black, two ancient powers are closing on the world — one that wants to grow it like a garden, one that wants to drain it like a battery. Beneath it all sleeps a secret older than either: a sealed fire that is not fuel but a lock, guarding something that must never be loosed. And a third voice, patient beyond reckoning, has broken its silence to whisper four words across the ice: I have been waiting.
To save the world she made, Anya will have to do the one thing she swore she never would again. She will have to stop hiding. She will have to let a whole people see exactly what she is — and pray they do not kneel.
Because the sky is coming. Not in greed this time, but in correction, which is worse — for greed can be frightened, and correction cannot. And the only thing in all the cold dark it has never learned to answer is a people taught, hand to hand, generation to generation, to look their makers dead in the eye and refuse.
Spanning the birth of a living world and the fall of its first great tower, GENESIS RISING is the opening tome of the Beyond Andromeda saga — a sweeping, intimate epic of deep time and forbidden love, of the first spark, the first question, and the first, defiant no.
Believe six impossible things before breakfast. This is the first.