Kepler Station is dying. The air is thin. The lights are failing. And the council has quietly decided to let it rot. Systems engineer Mara Voss has spent eleven months keeping this outer-colony station alive on stubbornness alone — crawling through conduits, filing reports nobody reads, patching failures nobody funds. She has never been afraid of anything she could diagnose. Then she finds the roots. Thick as her forearm. Warm. Bioluminescent. Threaded through the station's infrastructure ...