a week after eva stratt retrieves the answer to humanity's salvation, sent to them by the man she forced out into space to die, her people find a ragged, half dead and blood soaked woman clinging to an ice floe miles away from any land or ship
she's stained the ice and surrounding water all around her with what seems like gallons of slowly diluting blood, but aside from an already healed scar on her face, she is remarkably uninjured, if not nearly dead from hypothermia
when eva finally has a moment to talk with this woman, who has held onto life with broken bloodied fingernails, she is told a morbid story too fantastical to be believed:
about dead stars, and blood oceans, and a woman named ava, who sent a man into the unknown to die in the name of finding the answer to humanity's survival
