EARTH book 3

MARGARYS drops out of warp near Earth - someone is already hunting them. Eighty hours of comm silence wasn't caution. It was someone erasing the trail before the ship could land. They know where MARGARYS has been. They know what's inside the Sphere. One man in the Alliance's highest council would rather bury eight hundred thousand living people in the dark than let the truth reach home. Alex has sixteen days to reach Earth, and a surgeon's countdown running under his skin - what they cut from him is growing back, odds worsening every week. Rikki finally shows Mia something beautiful through a viewport instead of saying it out loud. Eva, mother to a voice not born of flesh, discovers her daughter keeping secrets at night - and must decide whether love means control or trust. Earth rises in the window: blue, white, green, spinning in cloud, eight billion lights on the night side. The matrix inside Eva asks the only question that matters - is this where you all came from? - and hears an answer that reshapes everything: a single family, torn apart eight thousand years ago, one branch never knowing the other survived. But knowing isn't enough. A senator has spent fifteen years making sure it never becomes real - funding shadow networks, burying a secret expedition's reports, choosing power over eight hundred thousand souls he once looked at and decided weren't worth saving. MARGARYS has one chance: reach an old friend in the admiralty before the hunters land, and open sealed archives that could end a career - or a family's silence forever. This is the book where a rescue becomes a reunion between two branches of one people, and where the Voice that has called Eva "mama" since Book One must choose between staying and going home. A little girl on a dying station chooses her own name after meeting an android - and chooses, too, to fly. Book three of Edelweiss - Rise and Legacy: Earth was never the destination. It was the family MARGARYS carried home.