Its utility suit is rumpled, its boots undone, its sleeves and collar pulled as low and as high as they go. She ignores the pain from her eyes- must her daughter always keep her room so bright?- and waits the moment it takes for her to distinguish the ﬁgure that is more collapsed than seated against the far wall. She dispatches the message as violently as possible, leans against the hatch, and begins a shrill danger-rattle with every available blade.Īnd then with a hiss and the screech of metal on chitin, the hatch slides aside to bathe Shenya the Widow in the blinding glow of her daughter’s quarters. , she sends, tapping a black and gleaming blade against the door. Shenya releases a slow and wrathful hiss. She attaches a few choice emotions- though she knows her daughter’s unit is too basic to read them- and ﬁres the message through the Network implant in the back of her head. She composes a Network message in her mind. She could be streaking through a moonlit forest with the rest of her covenant, the bloodlust boiling in her breast, her hunting cry joining those of her sisters in a chorus of beautiful death . . .

This is because Shenya the Widow has been conquered, mind and body, by an ancient and terrible force.Īnd so she crouches like death’s own shadow outside a closed bedroom door and ﬂexes a variety of bladed appendages in quiet reﬂection. She still fantasizes about it- though, sadly, fantasy is all she has left. Hunt all night, feast at dawn, take one’s pick of the choicest males before the long day’s sleep . . . And as hobbies- no, passions- go, it was extraordinarily fulﬁlling. Not so many years ago, Shenya the Widow was a void-cold killer.

Read a sneak-peek extract here: CHAPTER ONE As the lone survivors of a species destroyed a millennium ago, Sarya can almost accept that she’ll never know the truth about why humanity was deemed too dangerous to exist, but she must keep her identity hidden from the hundreds of alien species roaming the corridors of Watertower Station, if she wants to survive. It follows Sarya, the last human in the galaxy, who has been hidden away and raised by a giant alien spider. The Last Human is the rip-roaring, unapologetic space opera debut by Zack Jordan coming in March 2020.

The Last Human by Zack Jordan