Colony

Wren Calloway built this place one repair at a time, and never noticed when it became home.

Three years in, Sector 22 holds two hundred people, and Wren holds Sector 22: the water system, the power grid, the apprentices who show up at seven in the morning to learn how things work, the margin notes she leaves in every manual for whoever comes next. She is fifteen. She has a life she chose. She has stopped counting the days.

Then Earth opens the door to Mars.

Not for machines this time. For people. The Colonial Initiative wants engineers, and Wren qualifies, and one of the zones she can request is the one where a machine called Seven was sent to build a world she will never see. The application is right there on the screen. The transport is one-way.

To go is to walk forty million miles toward a question she has carried since she was twelve, and away from everything she has spent three years building. To stay is to leave that question unanswered, maybe forever. And the settlement can feel her leaning toward the exit, the way a system feels a fault before it fails.

Cole knows what it costs when the people who hold a place together decide somewhere else matters more. He has watched a home come apart before. He is not sure he can watch it again.

Home is not a place you find. It is a place you decide to defend, even when you could leave. But how do you tell the difference between chasing your future and abandoning yourself?

Book Three of The Calloway Signal.