One-Star Planet

Neither can Kern. He wakes on a couch with another woman's lip paint on his collar, a scent that isn't Tally's, and a cuff button he can't account for. Tally wakes with an unreadable name on her seating chart and an empty pocket where her contingency plan should be. They have nine years together, a ceremony in four hours, and two separate lists of everything they aren't saying.

By midday they've fled their own wedding through a door that opens onto the Circuit — an interworld transit network that runs on standing, declarations, and permanent records, and that shelves misrouted travelers in an archive alongside lost umbrellas and unclaimed shoes.

Somewhere in the hours they lost, one of them made a wager. The debt is real, it is enormous, and it is following them.

To clear it, they will have to stand in front of strangers and say precisely what they know, precisely what they don't, and precisely what they did.

They know each other better than anyone alive. It is the worst thing about them.

One-Star Planet is the first book in Backwater Worlds — a comedy-forward science fantasy romance about paperwork, devotion, and the difference between knowing someone and asking them.