The City Built by the Dead (The Saucer Series Book 2)

On the far side of the Moon stands a city four kilometers deep, built by hands that vanished a million years ago. Its lights are still on.

Engineering fiction: the decisive act is a repair, not a battle.

It has been waiting all this time — not for a conqueror or a pilgrim, but for a patient.

James Hather, the retired engineer who found a buried alien mind and became its friend, has crossed a quarter of a million miles to bring that friend home to the one place that can make it whole. Inside the ancient facility the miracles begin: the craft's broken body remade, its stolen memory returned one shard at a time — and James himself offered a gift no human has ever carried, the builders' own way of seeing. Time becomes a shape. The past becomes a country. And the memories coming back reveal builders who are not nearly as alien as they should be.

But in the builders' world, healing means reconnecting — and reconnecting means being seen . Somewhere beyond the city, something far older than its builders has begun to pay attention: a patient, inherited machine that does not forgive what James's friend has become. Every restored system sharpens the arithmetic. The day the craft is finally whole is the day it becomes visible.

Whole means visible. And what watches from the dark has been waiting even longer than the city.

Book Two of The Saucer Series. The story continues in The Thing We Built to End Us.