Dr. Isak Corell is a curator of dead things, an archivist of Earth's lost ecosystems. But when he is exiled to the Pavonis Mons colony on Mars, he finds a world on the brink of asphyxiation. The nitrogen is running out. The terraforming has failed. And Earth, governed by a paralyzed bureaucracy terrified of risk, has cut the supply lines.

With 500 days of air remaining, Isak realizes the machines cannot be fixed. The only solution is to fix the operator.

Partnering with a rogue physicist and a disgraced engineer, Isak initiates "The Somatic Bridge"-a radical retroviral therapy designed to rewrite the human genome. To survive the cold, the radiation, and the thin atmosphere, the colonists must trade their pink skin for grey armor, their lungs for filters, and their individuality for a hive mind known as the Syntony.

But when Earth returns to "rescue" the survivors, they don't find victims. They find a new apex predator. And the Martians have no intention of going back.