Nearly three centuries after climate collapse, humanity survives due to the labor contained within agricultural biomes called Farms—closed systems that feed the world and shape every aspect of those who are privileged to serve within them. Inside the Walls, people work, raise families, fall in love, and grieve. Life is shared, and care is freely given.
Sidra was raised inside the Farm and has a beautiful life there. She has been shaped for a single purpose: to carry the Farm’s philosophy forward--into its record, into her marriage, and into the next generation being shaped to inherit its promise. She holds to the conviction promised by the Farm not because she is naïve, but because she knows well that it has made her life possible. The Farm has given her order, belonging, and a future she believes is worth protecting.
Her husband, Rafe, keeps the Farm running. His work brings him into direct contact with the biome’s failures, where problems must be resolved without disturbing the image the system maintains of itself. He understands what must be contained so that life can proceed as intended. Their marriage has been shaped by that same discipline, love born under practiced steadiness, restraint, and an unspoken agreement to leave certain questions untouched so the work, and the future it promises, can continue.
After her best friend is falsely accused—and the system closes ranks around the lie—Sidra is forced to reckon with what her life depends on: whose bodies bear the cost of stability, whose losses are rendered necessary, and how much silence is required to keep the future intact. The danger does not arrive all at once. It seeps slowly into her marriage, her work, and the promises made to her children, until the framework that once held her life together begins to fracture.
Sidra is finally forced to confront the most uncomfortable thing of all: that the truth she has trusted may be inseparable from the harm it conceals.
This is not a story of rebellion, but of reckoning. Intimate and unflinching, this novel traces the moment when love and belief begin to demand opposite loyalties—and the cost of choosing between them.
