Shawna Tang wants to bring instantaneous travel to the galaxy's forgotten worlds. A rival movement is willing to break her mind to achieve the same dream on its own terms.
Once isolated from the wider galaxy herself, Shawna knows the cost of exclusion. Now a telepath, starship captain, and Portal Guardian, she travels aboard Starchaser with Ethan and their crew, searching for the telepaths needed to operate the Telpher Portals that connect distant worlds in an instant. But when political interests reserve the Portals for privileged systems, Shawna abandons official backing and turns toward the neglected Outer Worlds.
On the impoverished planet Achor, the telepath Bandor Soliman has spent his life fighting the same injustice. His alliance with NewOrder promises a peaceful revolution: Telpher travel without dependence on rare telepaths or Federation control. Behind that promise lies a plan to imprison Shawna and extract the power they need from her mind.
Cut off from Ethan and stripped piece by piece of her memory and identity, Shawna must hold on to whatever remains of herself. But when NewOrder's experiments push her beyond ordinary space, she encounters the Archoi-beings outside time whose attempt to help may alter the course of human evolution.
The consequences will follow Shawna, Ethan, and their children across decades, ultimately forcing Shawna to weigh the life and family she loves against the future of the human species.
Archoi: The Secret Behind the Stars is the third novel in the Telpher series, a character-driven science-fiction adventure of telepathy, political idealism, psychological survival, enduring love, alien contact, and human evolution. For the fullest experience of Shawna and Ethan's journey, begin with Telpher: A Time Travel Anomaly.