The number that could feed them and the number that could damn them turned out to be the same number. Fourteen months before a war anyone on this Mars advance crew could see began, the same budget act that defunded Exodus quietly cancelled the life-support shipment this colony was counting on - an unrelated line item, filed and forgotten, until the habitat's numbers stopped adding up. Marisol Kade found the shortfall first and told no one the real timeline. She built a second, honest ledger instead, and kept it to herself for a year, waiting for a way out that never came. Then a ship of unconfirmed survivors signals to dock, running authentication hardware built on Exodus's own charter architecture - and the crew's starvation arithmetic and the moral question of who gets to shelter here turn out to be the same number, run on the same hardware. Marisol trusts that number enough to argue for opening the gate, not from compassion but from cold arithmetic. Kwame Ferro - the man who loves her, and the one person on this crew with earned, verified history against anything Exodus ever certified - argues to refuse, not from fear. The gate doesn't open or close on its own. Somebody has to choose, and live with what the choice costs. What's inside: - Dual POV, strictly-alternating close-third - two colonists on the same side of the airlock, opposite sides of the decision- A hard-SF survival crisis and a moral reception dilemma that turn out to be one problem, not two- "Threshold Log" interstitials - the habitat's own cold, auto-compiled telemetry, escalating chapter by chapter- A genuine, earned disagreement between two people who love each other - no villain, no easy answer>Book 2 of the [SF / Fiction / Fantasy Series].
