Noa2Sole
Elias Venn was accused of murder before lunch and thrown out of the Dome before sunset.
He was never built for the outside. No one from the Dome was. Inside, people live behind clean glass, breathing filtered air, eating measured meals, riding electric shuttles across distances outsiders would barely call a walk. They are soft by design.
Outside, softness is a death sentence.
With no mask, no water, and no way back, Elias collapses less than two kilometers from the wall. That is where Kaia finds him.
She is a wasteland leader: tall, armed, brutal, and openly contemptuous of everything the Dome represents. She does not believe Elias is a murderer. Not because she trusts him, but because one look at his shaking hands tells her the Dome threw away something too fragile to survive a fair fight.
Still, fragile does not mean useless.
Elias can read systems, repair filters, open sealed technology, and understand the old infrastructure the outside settlements have been slowly dying around.
Kaia does not save him out of kindness.
She takes him because he might be worth the water.
Now Elias must survive the world beyond the Dome under the control of a girl who sees him as a tool before she sees him as a person. And Kaia must decide what to do with a glass boy who may be the key to breaking the system that abandoned him.