The Last Vigil

High above a frozen penal world, Cassian Vorne earns his keep with a pry bar, cutting corroded plating from the bones of a derelict frigate while Prison Overseer Troven watches from the trench. The cold is a kind of mercy, nothing grows here, nothing changes, until the morning a warrant arrives burned to cinders, the seal still half-readable, the order it carried impossible to ignore. Courier Aldris Penn carried the message. Now he carries the blame. Governor Selith Oran wants answers. Troven wants the warrant, the courier, and the crew that found it, buried under the ice. Thorne Maren, the colony's quiet fixer, offers Cassian a way out, if he is willing to break a man to take it. Deck Officer Yelma Hoss has begun moving her own people into position, and the frigate in the trench is no longer just a wreck. Cassian's sister Inara Vorne is already on the wrong side of the line, alongside Dorian Kael and the insurgent Lira Sable, who have been waiting for exactly this kind of fracture. Keth Voss and Helun Drey hold loyalties that no one has yet bought. When Yara Venn and Vey Arden press him from opposite directions, Cassian has one chance to choose: enforce the order that owns him, or hand the cinders to the rebellion already burning beneath his feet.