A Sacrifice of Blood and Stars

On a distant dwarf planet, a young soldier discovers her mortal enemy is her only tie to the world she left behind, in a high-stakes sci-fi romance.

Two months after her eighteenth birthday, scrappy Hikari Skye is ready to leave her ramshackle mobile home on Earth for icy dwarf planet Ceres and the underground bases that house Space Force. She’s trading her dingy trailer park, her baby sister Bea, and her best friend Rho for the excitement of the Proxy Wars and the freedom of the galactic front lines — where her father once deserted his own platoon. And the most appealing part? She’s leaving behind Draeden Rache, the cocky, privileged bully who tried to kiss her last year.

Appealing, that is, until Drae and Kari are tied together by the Pairing Ceremony as Sympathetics. Each week she’ll share everything with him and him alone: emotions, fears, and the sneaking suspicion that something is very, very wrong. As Kari struggles to survive life in a unit that can only see her as a defector’s spawn, Drae and Rho work to solve a mystery of their own back at a futuristic UC Berkeley.

With the California Federation’s proxy war with the Siberian Federation heating up and Raiders creeping closer by the day, Kari and Drae’s weekly interactions turn into a race against time, even as their feelings for each other grow.