"Some signals were always there. It just took the right people to hear them."
Nila Reyes has spent her whole life on Mars Colony 4, reading rooms before she speaks to them and writing everything down in paper journals because she doesn't trust data that can be erased. She arrives at Starbound Academy carved into the upper rings of a space station orbiting the Moon expecting fast minds, real problems, and the first school that might actually keep up with her.
What she doesn't expect is a Pulse Band showing a colour no one can classify.
Or a lab partner named Avi Orin, whose own band barely glows at all ; a careful silver that never shows what he's actually feeling.
Or what she finds on the first night, pressed behind the ventilation grille in her dormitory room: a letter, hidden there for eleven years, written by a senior technician who investigated something in the station's walls and was never seen again.
The signal is real. It has been transmitting through the station's ventilation system for longer than Helix Station has been a school. It pulses at thirty-one second intervals - a prime number, which doesn't happen in nature - in the direction of something in the outer solar system that the public survey catalogue doesn't acknowledge exists.
Someone built a school on top of it. Someone has been making sure no student gets close enough to understand what it is.
Nila and Avi, along with fast-thinking Priya, precise Seren, and ferocious Dax, have seven days to connect the pieces before they become visible to the people watching for exactly this kind of inquiry.
Book one of Starbound Academy Novel series :- : "The Pulse Between Us* is a gripping science fiction mystery for readers aged 11-17. It features a cast of sharp, emotionally real teenagers navigating their first year at an elite space station school, a slow-burn romance built on compatible minds and carefully chosen words, and a mystery with stakes that grow from a sealed ventilation grille all the way to the edge of the solar system.
For readers who loved *The Lunar Chronicles*, *A Deadly Education*, and *An Ember in the Ashes*.
**The relay network is larger than one station. Book Two: The Rho Tier - coming soon.**
