Decades ago, humanity built massive weather modification towers to combat global warming. The machines malfunctioned, plunging the Earth into a permanent, catastrophic ice age. The surface is completely frozen and uninhabitable. What's left of humanity is packed into Colony 7 - a bunker of steel corridors, flickering lights, and rationed heat, where catching a cold can earn you a bullet or a one-way walk into the snow.

And then there's the Botanical Bay.

Eighty degrees. Wet earth and green leaves and the pink-gold glow of grow lamps standing in for a sun nobody under thirty has ever seen. It's the only warm room in a frozen tomb, and the colony comes here to remember what alive smells like.

Hazel runs it. She's twenty-two, born in the bunker, head botanist by inheritance and by stubbornness - the tomatoes and potatoes and soy that keep a few hundred people fed are hers. She forgets to eat. She loses her tools in her own pockets. She talks to her plants, sneaks bruised fruit to the colony's kids against regulation, and rambles about soil chemistry when she gets nervous. She's the warm heart of a dead world and has absolutely no idea that's what she is.