Homesmind

Anra is a solitary – a child born without the power to mindspeak, to communicate in unspoken thoughts. Years ago, Anra would have been killed at birth. But ever since the Wanderer, the comet controlled by the cybernetic intelligence called Homesmind, had come into Earth's orbit, everything had changed. The people of the comet, the skydwellers, supply solitaries with implants that allow them to mindspeak artificially. Solitaries are no longer destroyed, but are sent to the one village willing to care for these children.

Anra and those born like her were to have been a bridge between the skydwellers and the people of Earth, who still consider solitaries an abomination and all skydwellers soulless. But the gulf separating the two cultures seems unbridgeable, and Anra and her friends have become outcasts in both worlds – part of each yet truly belonging to neither.

Then another comet world enters Earth's system. It refuses to communicate its intentions to Homesmind. It calls to the people of Earth with the voices of their dead. It seduces them into the submission of their wills and seeks to lure them into oblivion. Only Anra and the children of her village, raised separately from the rest of Earth's children, have the strength to resist its call, if they can gather their meager forces in time.