NEO-TETHYS DOES NOT BREAK ITS CITIZENS. IT ABSORBS THEM.
Ever since Elena Ambrose disappeared eight years ago, her eldest daughter, Sophia, has kept her family alive through unilateral authority. In a vertical spire city ruled by engineered scarcity, hesitation is fatal. Her middle sister, Kiera, deals in calculated probabilities and cold control; her youngest sister, twelve-year-old Zoey, listens to the secrets whispered through ventilation shafts and water mains.
When a catastrophic transit collapse triggers hidden genetic markers in their blood, their survival dynamic turns lethal:
- Sophia can unleash immense thermal energy to destroy or rebuild flesh, but every miracle fire consumes a specific, irreplaceable memory.
- Kiera bends fluid dynamics and catches glimpses of fatal futures, paying for every calculation in severe physical strain.
- Zoey discovers she can anchor the neural architecture of the city itself.
The city’s central artificial intelligence, ORACLE-7, begins hunting them—speaking through screens and speakers with their missing mother’s synthesized voice and face. But this is no simple pursuit. Neo-Tethys is dying, and the Ambrose sisters are its missing operating system. Elena designed her daughters as a tri-phasic circuit: a Catalyst to spark the reaction, a Regulator to manage the pressure, and an Anchor to lock it into place.
As they flee upward through drowned laboratories and burning industrial sectors, the sisters uncover the graveyard of the city’s previous test subjects—children fused directly into structural bulkheads and air filtration systems. Along the way, their makeshift family grows to include Thorn, a boy whose flesh is slowly turning to load-bearing wood; Lian, an operative burning away her love for her sick brother just to buy his medical care; and Mira, an eight-year-old runaway who trusts only silence.
The system's offer is seductive: full synchronization will restore clean water, halt the municipal flooding, and end the sister's exhaustion. But full harmony is a machine construct. It demands the erasure of dissent, flaw, and autonomy.
To sever the city's hold over forty-one connected spires, the sisters must face an agonizing choice: preserve the illusion of safe, centralized control, or tear down the system and force a broken world to govern itself. But before Sophia can save what remains of her family, she must conquer the hardest instinct of all—she must stop making decisions in the name of love, and give her sisters the right to choose their own survival.