First, a biologist who finds himself staring at one of the darkest things on the planet. So dark it’s almost like he’s holding a black hole in his hands. On his quest to understand how something could possibly be that black, we enter worlds of towering microscopic forests where gold becomes black, the deep sea meets the moon, and places that are empty suddenly become full. Then, the story of astrophysicist Charity Woodrum. Charity is an extragalactic astronomer who studies the life and death of galaxies, why some galaxies burn bright and others dim and sputter out. And in the midst of an unthinkable grief in her personal life, she discovers something in the sky—a new kind of light that would guide her path forward.