Two kilometres beneath the Antarctic ice, a research station is failing. One engineer remains inside, keeping its last living systems alive.
When a structural failure tears through Erebus Deep Station, Priya Okonkwo is forced to seal a flooding bulkhead. The action saves the Greenhouse and the cultures that sustain the station. It also leaves her colleague Ines on the other side.
The decision is necessary. Priya must live with its cost.
With the evacuation vessel gone, Priya is left alone beneath the Ronne Ice Shelf. Power declines. The hull weakens. Filters fail. The cultures that clean the air and keep the closed system breathing begin to turn grey. Every repair preserves one part of the station by consuming another, and every calculation reduces the time remaining.
Then the surface delivers its final decision. Erebus Deep has been decommissioned. No recovery mission is scheduled. The station, its living stock and the person still aboard have all been entered into the official record as lost.
But the green is still alive.
As the station contracts around her, Priya must decide what can still be kept, what must be surrendered and whether the life entrusted to her can be made to survive after her own hands can no longer tend it.
The Last Greenhouse is a literary science-fiction novel about isolation, grief, institutional abandonment and the moral burden of preserving fragile life in a world that has already written it off.
Enter Erebus Deep, where survival is temporary, rescue is uncertain and keeping something alive may demand everything.
