Mano has spent decades hiding from humanity aboard a secret space station orbiting Earth, keeping company with a plotting AI, an army of robotic animals, and his own carefully contained power. When his brother, the shadowy ruler of thirteen bloodline families, dumps three survivors of a lunar school massacre into his care, Mano is forced back into contact with the world he abandoned. What follows is a tightly wound novella of memory probes, soul-ripping teenagers, rogue Tier 5 beings, and an AI that has been quietly engineering the collapse of civilization one catastrophe at a time.