Forsaking Home

Edin Thomas has played by Earth's rules his whole life, and it has cost him everything. After defending himself against a mugger leaves him financially ruined by a corrupt legal system, and the murder of his principled grandfather goes unpunished, Edin recognizes a hard truth: the game is rigged. When his grandfather's will offers passage aboard the Proxima Project, humanity's first interstellar colony ship, Edin must convince his pregnant wife Amanda to abandon Earth forever for a one-way journey to build a new world called Terra.

Running parallel to Edin's desperate escape is a professional assassin of cool precision and ruthless pragmatism. Hired to sabotage the Proxima mission, she operates by a code of absolute control and untraceability, her identity fragmented across aliases like costumes she can never remove. But her latest contract has drawn the attention of a mysterious figure she calls "Plaid," whose inexplicable appearances at her job sites threaten the one certainty she has built her life upon: that she is always the most dangerous variable in any room. As she closes in on the colony ship Heldin, her professional discipline collides with an unexpected realization, the colonists are pursuing something she has never allowed herself to want, a future with roots, continuity, and hope. Two lives on collision course: one man fleeing a broken world to protect his family, one woman defending the only self she has left, both about to discover that escape and sabotage may demand the same impossible price.