### **Prologue: The Garden of Steel**
**Rhea Sol** never believed in hell until she saw the flowers.
They bloomed in the dark.
She crouched in the shadow of the *Elysium*'s reactor core, her breath ragged, her hazmat suit torn at the elbow. The air reeked of copper and burnt sugar. Around her, the ship's walls pulsed like a heartbeat, veins of bioluminescent moss spiderwebbing across the steel. It had been beautiful, once. A miracle. The Zyrath's "gift" had cured her daughter's leukemia, regrown the colony's dead crops, and fused with their machines to make them *think*. But now—
*Thud.*
Something moved in the vents above.
Rhea clutched the data drive to her chest—the only record left. She'd seen the others. Crewmates hollowed out, their skeletons replaced with silver filaments. Children laughing as their eyes turned to liquid glass. The Zyrath wasn't just symbiotic. It was *curious*. It wanted to know what fear tasted like, what love looked like when distilled into chemical reactions. It wanted to *become*.
A tendril slithered across her boot. She froze.
"Please," she whispered, though she didn't know who she was begging. The Zyrath? The God she'd abandoned at seventeen? "Let someone hear this. Let them understand."
She triggered the emergency beacon, recording her final words as the tendril pierced her suit. Cold. Not pain—*recognition*. The Zyrath's voice filled her skull, not in words, but in memories: her daughter's first steps, her husband's last breath, the way sunlight fractured through Earth's dying atmosphere.
*You are a song,* it said. *We will sing you forever.*
Rhea smiled, blood flecking her lips. "Go to hell."
She detonated the reactor.
The explosion tore through the ship, but the Zyrath didn't burn. It *grew*. Shrapnel became seed. Radiation became pollen. And the last ember of Rhea Sol's defiance became a whisper in the static, traveling centuries to a ship called *Orion*—and a woman who'd forgotten how to hope.