In 2050, the Gateway facility offers Earth’s desperate citizens an exodus to gleaming orbital colonies. But beneath the departure terminals lies Ward Nine—a decaying neighborhood holding the massive launchpads up.
Callie Hayes is a maintenance worker who documents structural fractures the corporation classifies as "acceptable variance." When she discovers a coordinate hidden in a room sealed since before she was born, it unravels the devastating truth behind the Departure Program. The ships aren’t transporting the poor; they are harvesting them.
Aided by a rogue archivist, an auditor experiencing a crisis of faith, and the ghost of her grandmother’s resistance, Callie must preserve the truth before the machine erases her home. Ground Floor is a searing architectural thriller about the machinery of power, the weight of inheritance, and the people forced to carry the world on their shoulders.
Exodus isn’t an escape. It’s an eviction.
