Last Light in the Dark
A child marked by cosmic horror becomes humanity's only bridge to an entity that does not want to conquer - it wants to merge.
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Marcus and his salvage team thought they drew the worst assignment: investigating the Veil, a sphere of absolute darkness that has engulfed an entire solar system.
No light escapes. No signals penetrate. And everyone sent inside has vanished without a trace.
On Moon Base X-95-A, they find an empty hangar covered in dust and a radio operator who claims everything is "hunky dory"—despite the base being abandoned for weeks. In the ventilation shafts, fresh scratches mark where someone was dragged into the darkness. And in the crystalline alien city below, something ancient is waiting.
When their dropship is destroyed, the team has no choice but to descend into impossible corridors where reality itself breaks down. Two kilometers beneath the surface, they discover the truth: a Fist of the First Citizen—an augmented supersoldier—has been hunting in these tunnels for two hundred years. And he is not the only thing that survived.
With creatures swarming from every shadow and the corrupted Fist closing in, the team must cross 23 kilometers of barren lunar surface to reach their only hope of escape. But even if they survive, they will remain trapped within the Veil—a prison from which nothing has ever returned.
In the darkness between stars, the past never dies. It just keeps hunting.
Last Light in the Dark is a relentless sci-fi horror thriller that blends Alien's claustrophobic terror with the cosmic dread of Annihilation.
This is for you if…
- You love stories that trade comfort for dread and won't flinch from the dark.
- Tight third-person POV keeps you close to the people who matter — and far from the ones who don't.
- You're looking for a world to live in, not a single weekend read. Last Light runs deep.
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"Why do we always get the—"
"Don't even think about finishing that statement," Rylee Voss warned. Marcus Reeves couldn't see her face behind the mask of her vac suit, but he could imagine the expression of stern disapproval he'd seen a thousand times before. The way her jaw tightened. The slight narrowing of her eyes that promised consequences.
"What?" Lucas Chen asked innocently. He was standing on the wrecked ship just ahead of Marcus, digging through a stack of old cables that were stiff and brittle from time spent in the vacuum of space. One snapped loose in his hand, exposing the tiny frozen wires like metal veins. He tossed it overhead, letting it float out into nothingness, spinning slowly as it caught the distant starlight.
"You heard me."
"I was just going to say—"
"You were going to ask why we always get stuck with bad jobs, but 'bad' wasn't going to be the word you used, was it?"
The only sound for the next few long seconds was their collective breathing transmitted through the comm system. Marcus could hear the faint hum of his suit's recycler working overtime, the soft ping of debris striking the outer hull somewhere in the distance.
Lucas cleared his throat. "So, yeah, that was what I was going to say, but my point still stands. I mean, you know I'm right. We're always stuck with the jobs no other team wants."
"Someone has to do them."
"But why is it always us? Did I piss somebody off in a past life and this is my revenge? Did you piss somebody off higher up the chain?" Lucas asked. "Wait, never mind. Don't answer that. It's you, after all, so I know you pissed someone off."
"Ours is not to reason why..."
"Yeah, yeah, I get it. Your favorite poem. It's a stupid poem, in my humble opinion, because the entire point of it is 'don't complain when you're about to die.' You know what? I would rather not die, if given the choice, and if I am going to die, I sure as hell am going to complain about it. What is our chance of dying on a stupid asset recovery mission like this, anyway? Like two percent? Less? It's probably less."
"I would have thought our chance of dying out here was around zero," Marcus offered.
"Unless I shoot you," Rylee added.
"That's not funny," Lucas said. "But you know what I mean. We're not exactly risking our lives out here. Unless you think there is a chance we're going to die of boredom."
"You would rather be somewhere risking your life?"
"I would like for there to be some risk. I didn't sign up to be a glorified trash man."
"That's a stupid thing to hope for."
"I mean, I don't want to die or anything, I just..."
"You just what?"
"Back me up here, Marcus. You know this is a joke detail."
Marcus shook his head. "I'm staying out of it."
"Admit it. You would rather be back in your bunk getting some shuteye. Or better yet, working with Alpha Squad to clear the bridge and main decks of the wreck. You might not get to shoot something, but you'll at least come out of here with accolades for finding something useful."
"That wasn't our assignment."
Lucas threw up his hands in exasperation, the gesture looking absurd in the zero-gravity environment as his arms floated back down slowly. "That's my entire point."
Marcus pursed his lips and kept working. Before this assignment, he had been a freelance documentarian, chasing stories across three systems. The military had recruited him for his skills with a camera and his knack for finding truth in chaos. What they hadn't told him was that those skills would mostly be used cataloging debris fields and documenting salvage operations that nobody else wanted to touch.
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Kate's progression from survivor age 8 to sacrifice age 17-18, connection to dimensional entity, and ultimate integration to teach it how to die peacefully.