When Gyre Price lied her way into this expedition, she thought she’d be mapping mineral deposits, and that her biggest problems would be cave collapses and gear malfunctions. She also thought that the fat paycheck – enough to get her off-planet and on the trail of her mother – meant she’d get a skilled surface team, monitoring her suit and environment, keeping her safe. Keeping her sane. Instead, she got Em. Em sees nothing wrong with controlling Gyre’s body with drugs or withholding critical information to “ensure the smooth operation” of her expedition. Em knows all about Gyre’s falsified credentials, and has no qualms using them as a leash, a sword above Gyre’s head. And Em has secrets, too: over two dozen other cavers dead, all in pursuit of an obsessive quest to find Em’s parents, lost in the bowels of the planet.

Gyre refuses to die for Em’s grief, but gaining enough intel to blackmail Em into letting her go and stopping her from hurting anybody else means staying in the depths of the cave a little longer. Except the longer she spends alone with Em, the more she starts to understand the other woman and the more she wants to help free her from the curse her family’s death placed on her. And if the other cavers Em lost are all dead, why is Gyre seeing their faces watching her from the shadows, disappearing when she turns her suit’s cameras on them? Why are her readouts sometimes flat wrong?

Why can’t she shake the feeling that she’s being followed?