When Earth collapses, a desperate colonisation mission carries humanity’s last hope across the void. Among the crew is Ye-Min, the mission’s astronomer - and the first to understand that the new world is not empty.
Waiting for them is an apex species: chemically powerful, alien, humane in its own logic, and intelligent enough to recognise humans as an existential threat. Their response is decisive. The crew’s minds are reduced to primitive instinct and manipulated into a tribal existence where they worship a false god they call Hexibarber.
As weather shifts violently and hidden forces move in the dark, Ye-Min - newly awakened and fighting to reclaim her intelligence - begins to uncover a larger design: abandoned machines acting strangely, unexplained experiments in hidden places, and a native species preparing a future in which humans may have a role... or become prey.
To survive, Ye-Min must navigate a world shaped by the Alloy, a universal element binding life, memory, and physics itself.