Living in orbit around a planet dozens of light-years from Earth, twenty-five-year-old Kawsay Alcides is a tortured soul. Haunted by guilt over a space mining accident that took the lives of most of her family, and traumatized into believing she’s a qinchachay—an Andean harbinger of death and misfortune to those she loves—the daughter of Quechua-speaking South American immigrants has withdrawn into an unlife of self-pity on an orbital space station, working a menial desk job while estranging herself from Nuri, her widowed sister, and Amankay, her thirteen-year-old niece.

But Kawsay’s self-imposed shell of isolation cracks open when she’s forced to take guardianship of Amankay after Nuri falls into a coma, wounded after a peculiar street mugging that might be tied to Kawsay’s past. Terrified she’ll bring further tragedy to Amankay—who already despises the aunt who made her a half-orphan—Kawsay struggles to rebuild a relationship neither one of them wants as she tries to uncover the truth behind Nuri’s attack, a mystery that eerily echoes the dark, true history of the 16th-century clash of religions when the Conquistadors subjugated South America’s native cultures.

Now, as the case intersects with political intrigues within the station and whispers of mysterious sightings in the outer reaches of the system, the reluctant aunt-niece pair must revisit what really happened in Kawsay’s bizarre spaceship accident years before, the one that altered all three women’s destinies. For Kawsay’s traumatic experience may hide a secret that could change the fate of all humanity… and shatter what’s left of her family’s already fractured soul.