So her family may survive, Cora will embrace the burden of unimaginable power.
But if she could change her history, and heal all wounds... would she?

Cora has been avoiding home. She doesn't quite mean to, but it happens anyway. A lot of things have been weighing on her, as the world stands to change yet again, crawling inexorably out of the cold inconvenience of community subsistence living and back into the gentle, familiar embrace of industry. Factories are raised. Electricity is on the horizon. The fleet's glory will, some day, be reclaimed.

Cora can't stop wondering how long until humans don't want to do the work anymore, and the age of the fabricant begins again.

Now Cora returns home to keep an old promise, hope in her heart that she can still find her sanctuary among her lovers, and though her return comes with a strange coldness, she is greeted by Minerva: daughter of Sarah and Annalise, now a young woman eager to explore the world, and understand her long-absent mother.

But all is not as it seems. Minerva has secrets of her own, a dark and fearful prophecy calling her to the bowels of the earth, and waiting there beneath the pale surface of humanity's new home is a final trial for the beleaguered dregs of human civilization: a trial to be faced by Cora alone.