Alyssa Powell

Song From A Shattered Lyre

Two years after Elara Corbin and Dr. Lena Novak left Earth to start a colony on Mars, a devastating accident claimed Elara. Shortly after the report reached Earth, the colony went silent. For decades, the world believed Elysium died with her – and that Dr. Lena Novak was responsible.

In 2097, after an orbital telescope spots a thriving settlement on Mars where Elysium was said to have perished, Earth sends Kaelen Reyes to discover how an outpost cut off from home managed to survive. What she finds is a garden where there should have been a tomb, and a vilified Lena still very much alive. As Kaelen digs into the colony’s survival, Lena offers her a ghost story instead of a mission report – one defined by the undeniable gravity of her love for Elara.

But Lena isn’t just recounting her saga; she is exhuming a bitter crime. Through the colony’s testimony, Kaelen uncovers a history of sabotage and breathtaking sacrifice. Armed with the truth about the ruin of the woman Lena loved, Kaelen is forced into a choice: return to Earth with the lie she was raised on, or force a struggling planet to face what it actually takes to survive – that beyond cold engineering, salvation requires the kind of deep devotion Lena held for her wife.

The sapphic aerospace drama of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere with the post-collapse resilience and dual-timeline structure of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.

Inheritance of Faults

Standalone with four sequel outlines

With an urn of ashes, a blinding migraine, and the hellish South Texas heat as her only company, feral geophysicist Ana Reed drives to the borderlands to fulfill her mother’s final, spiteful request: spend two weeks on the abandoned family property before selling it. But when she arrives in sun-scorched Frontera, she finds a massive corporate oil rig looming on her fenceline. By nightfall, the bedrock itself starts screaming at her.

Across town, Dr. Isabel Navarro is meticulously preparing to die. The impeccable, controlled historian has spent years managing the ghosts that haunt the edges of her vision, but the Anima Terra—the ancient, metaphysical vein of magic running beneath Frontera—is fracturing. Someone is drilling into it. And every time the drill bites, Isabel’s nervous system pays the toll in devastating, inexplicable seizures.

When Ana’s lab-grade scanner detects a perfect, atom-thin wall buried deep in the earth, she marches into Isabel’s climate-controlled archive demanding a 17th-century map to explain it. Their collision triggers a binding power neither knew existed, leaving physical proximity as the only thing keeping Ana’s mind quiet and Isabel’s body alive. Ana, who has never done closeness, can’t find the want to leave; Isabel, whose affairs are already in order, begins to hope for more time.

It will take a combination of deep-earth geology, 17th-century border history, and a staggering amount of will to stop the corporate rig from tearing apart the boundary between Texas and Mexico, and life and death.

A love letter to and a critique of the true history of the peoples of northern Mexico and South Texas. In conversation with Isabel Cañas’s The Possession of Alba Díaz and Alix E. Harrow’s Starling House.