Sirantha Jax was lucky, or unlucky enough depending on your viewpoint, to be born with the J-gene. This enables her to be a Jumper, she takes ships through Grimspace, a faster than light way to travel. Grimspace is as beautiful as it is deadly. Jumpers have a very short life expectancy because one day they just burn out and won’t come back from Grimspace. While Jumpers are the eyes, they work closely with a pilot who becomes their hands to fly them through space. A very intense, enmeshed relationship, Jax is nearly destroyed when a mission goes bad and her lover and pilot dies in the crash. Jax doesn’t remember what went wrong, and someone wants to ensure that she never does.

March is a man on a mission; he steals Jax from the Corp and enlists her to fly his ship for a covert rebel operation. But the kidnapping goes awry and the pilot of March’s ship is killed forcing him to take the man’s place. The last thing either he or Jax want is to be forced to connect so closely. But, March will do anything to see his mission succeed, even if it means enmeshing himself with Jax’s damaged psyche.

Whew! I could not put this book down. Jax and March are such strong, tortured characters that you are immediately drawn in on a visceral level. Jax, appears to be an abrasive woman on the surface, then you delve beneath the layers and find a woman barely holding on to her sanity. Talk about having a bad day, Jax is having a bad year. She is involved in a crash that kills her lover and several important political figures, and she has no memory of what happened. She is the only survivor and on top of that guilt she has no idea if she is what caused the crashed. March appears to be a stoic, hard man but that facade covers a man trying to keep a promise, even if it kills him. March is a very interesting character that just gets more intriguing as you begin to peel back the layers that hide underneath that stoicism. With a cast of supporting characters that do their job of highlighting the main characters, an action packed plot, several mysteries, and the developing intricacies of Jax and March’s relationship, Ann Aguirre has built a world that I can’t wait to come back and visit.

Reviewed by: Hayley