Aviana Violet -

But Aviana was attached. Especially to the smallest orchid, a fragile, deep-purple thing she had secretly named Violet. While the other flowers wilted under the artificial UV lamps, Violet thrived. Its petals shimmered with a strange, internal luminescence, as if holding a memory of something the city had lost.

Aviana Violet had never seen a sunrise. Not a real one.

She was twelve, with storm-colored eyes and hair the shade of dried kelp, and she spent her days in the Hydroponic District, tending to the only living things that still remembered light: a row of struggling violet orchids.

Kael knelt beside her. "Now, Aviana Violet, we show the others how to climb."

It was Kael. He wasn't grumbling. He was smiling, his weathered face wet with tears. In his hand, he held a single violet petal.

It bled across the sky—lavender, rose, then blinding orange. Aviana wept. She didn't know why. Her lungs burned with real, unfiltered air, cold and sharp and sweet. For the first time, her name made sense. She was a bird, risen from the sea.

She lived in Veridian, a city buried a mile beneath the Atlantic, where the "sun" was a holographic projection on the dome ceiling—a pale, clinical imitation that shifted from amber to gray on a twenty-four-hour cycle. Her name, Aviana, meant "bird," which her mother had thought was a cruel joke in a world without sky.

She was the key.