A man is dead outside Kepler Station, tethered to the hull, eyes open - with alien mathematics burned into both retinas.
Rael Doss was a maintenance technician. He was thirty-four. And officially, he never existed - because he came from a hidden community of forty-two thousand people living below a station deck, uncounted for four generations.
Dr. Yara Osei investigates records. Her discipline is the both-things account: every fact true, achievement and harm held at equal weight. She has staked eleven years and twenty-three certified cases on a single conviction - that the record is a neutral instrument.
It is not. And she has a body to prove it, filed nowhere.
What Rael Doss saw runs deeper than one death: a gift given to humanity in 2198, half of it kept, half of it buried - the half that tells the truth. Someone has been waiting one hundred and eighty-nine years for an answer.
And in Renash Tor, Yara faces an opponent who has never told a lie in his life. He doesn't need to. He keeps a ledger of four hundred and eleven people destroyed by true disclosures. He is about to publish her findings - accurately, completely, instantly.
How do you fight a man whose weapon is the truth, and whose aim is better than yours?
The Honest Machine, Book One.