AVA: The First Sky.

A secret elite calls itself the Curatorium. Its head, Dr. Konrad Vance, considers humanity the mistake and its extinction the correction. The Curatorium releases an airborne virus and calls it a cleansing, in the name of saving the planet.

Monsignor Elias Rinaldi, prefect of the Apostolic Archive, learns of the plan in the one place he is forbidden to speak of it: the confessional. He has no proof, no authority that will believe him, and a few weeks of time.

So under the cover of a summit on the future, he invites twelve people to Rome. A virologist, a geneticist, an AI researcher, an artist, an inventor, a builder, an ethicist, a psychologist, a mathematician, a botanist, a radio operator, a healer. On the day the virus is released, he leads them into a sealed chamber deep beneath the Vatican and walks in as the thirteenth. The time-lock will only open once the virus has died. In ten years.

The Chamber of Inventions

The shelter is only the front section of a much larger complex. From it a door leads directly into the Chamber of Inventions. Not a museum, a vault. Blueprints, prototypes, working devices, gathered by the Church over centuries because some knowledge seemed too sacred and some too dangerous. AI cores. Nano assemblers. Genome tools that vanished just before their public release. Elias opens that door and does what his Church shrank back from for centuries: he lets the Thirteen use everything. In ten years they turn dusty prototypes into a functioning world.

A nano medicine that scans the body and repairs it from within, cures cancer, extends life · for everyone, at no price. A kitchen that reads what a body needs on that day and cooks exactly that.

A reading device that translates the signals of the global root and fungal network, so plants warn of earthquakes and shifts in weather long before any human senses them.

A personal shield field that stops everything fast that tries to enter and lets through everything slow · a bullet bounces off, a hand does not.

And Pythia, a personal AI companion, named after the oracle priestess of Delphi, worn as a milky-bright stone on a cord. You speak with her, ask her, learn with her. When called, a slender figure of warm light grows from the stone. No one is left alone with their questions.

The question that never falls silent underground: how much of this may we take with us to the surface?

Ten Years

Shortly after the sealing, Ava is born · the first child of the new world. She knows no sun, no rain, no wind. Only Yara's colours, Maren's voice, Raphael's stories, Elias' prayer and Pythia's whisper. And she knows no fear. Not because she is brave, but because no one has ever taught her what it is.

Five years later Manu is born, the second child. While the adults grieve their dead, they build a culture of decency for the two children. They argue, they make up, and they learn the sentence that becomes the foundation of the new world: repairing matters more than being pure.

The First Sky

When the time-lock opens, the adults stay at the threshold. They knew the world that died up there and still carry every person they lost. Only Ava, almost ten and without a single memory of the old world, walks out.

A courtyard, cracked open by a wild fig tree. Above her, something she knows only from Yara's watercolours: blue, in motion. She reaches up.

Rome is not deserted. Rome is overgrown. St. Peter's Square a meadow of wildflowers, the Tiber wide and still between green banks. The earth has weathered the ten years better than the people did.

Nine Arks, Three Bunkers

But the earth is not empty.

Before the outbreak, Elias had warned a small circle of confidants all over the world, each with the same task: save twelve people, choose them wisely, seal them in. So nine shelters have grown, in places that for centuries or millennia have done nothing but preserve.

Rome, the Vatican. Elias' group, the starting point, the only archive that houses the Chamber of Inventions.

The Sonnenberg tunnel near Lucerne. Once the largest civilian nuclear shelter in the world, built for twenty thousand people, deep inside the Swiss rock. The first ark to reach Rome comes from here.

Derinkuyu in Cappadocia. An ancient underground city in soft tuff stone, eight levels deep, carved thousands of years ago by people already fleeing the surface once before.

Lalibela in Ethiopia. Eleven churches hewn downward out of the solid rock. A sacred guardian like the Vatican, only older and poorer, and therefore never plundered.

The Padmanabhaswamy temple in Kerala. The wealthiest temple in the world, with sealed vaults no one has opened to this day. Anyone sitting down there sits behind doors that have already held for centuries.

The tomb complex of Qin Shi Huang near Xi'an. The underground necropolis behind the Terracotta Army, sealed for more than two thousand years and still largely unexplored.

Coober Pedy in Australia. A whole town that moved underground because the heat above was unbearable. Houses, churches, shops, all cut into the sandstone.

Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. A bunker complex in granite, mounted on giant springs, built to survive a nuclear war. The place where America intended to survive.

Cusco and the tunnels of Machu Picchu. Hidden passages in the Inca highlands, of which archaeology knows only a fraction.

Together, about one hundred and fifty people. A study by the University of Strasbourg suggests that ninety-eight are enough · forty-nine pairs · to re-found humanity with full prospects of success. So the number is there. Only no ark knows about the others, and between them lies a planet without power, without networks, without aircraft.

And then there are the three bunkers.

The Curatorium survived its own virus in three facilities it had prepared long in advance. In the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Norwegian Arctic, the real-world doomsday vault, where it is decided which life is preserved and which is not. Precisely the logic of the curator, built in ice. In the Underground Great Wall, China's secret tunnel network deep beneath the rock, military, vast, on no map. And in a converted Atlas missile silo in Kansas, a luxury bunker for the wealthy, with pool, cinema and stockrooms · selection by fortune rather than by merit.

Roughly four hundred and fifty people, three times as many as in all nine arks combined. They have weapons, structure, and a plan that leaves no room for arks: to rule the new world alone.

AVA: THE FIRST SKY tells of the return to the surface and the first contact between the arks. Of a child who must remind the people who saved her how to stop being afraid of the sky.