But Chia’s hands remembered something else.

Chia Anme had never seen rain touch the earth.

The problem arrived on a three-legged mule: a messenger from the Lower Sinks, a boy named Renn with a gas-sheet over his mouth and a data-slate clutched to his chest. The miners’ deep pumps had finally hit a cavern—not of water, but of salt gas , a corrosive, expanding fog that would, within seventy-two hours, eat through every lung, every seal, every glass facet of the Folly.

She worked through the night, not sleeping, not eating. She rerouted the dome’s condensation coils into a series of capillary tubes—thin as spider silk, hundreds of them. She bled a little of the acacia’s resin into a glass jar, mixing it with crushed herba seeds and her own sweat (salts, electrolytes, catalysts). Then she connected the tubes to the dome’s emergency pressure vent—the same one the miners wanted her to open wide.

Chia stared at him. “That would kill the garden.”