A month after the Pacific, the Nautilus is barely a submarine. Her hull is cracked, her shaft is scored, and seventy-one people breathe air that smells of burned insulation. Then a seamount fault tears open the vault at Orpheus Station, Elena Vasquez's parent stock gets into the North Atlantic, and within minutes the kelp beside the station turns to gray stone.
Sofia Vasquez knows the only counter is buried in her dead mother's work: two data partitions sealed in seabed nodes off Svalbard, a seed locked inside an abandoned station on the Mohns Ridge, and a compile array that answers to one living hand. Hers.
To reach them, she has to take a dying submarine north under the Arctic ice, with Axiom closing every way out and Captain Nemo no longer in command. Every watch costs something. Every vote costs someone.
Every number aboard is rationed. So is the truth.