The Guardians

Mryna Brill has lived her entire life on Rythar, convinced she inhabits Earth. The clouds above never part. The 'Earth-god' watches from the Guardian Wheel in the sky. Everything she knows is a carefully constructed lie. When she finally breaks through the atmosphere, she finds not divine salvation but a man at a control panel, engineering reality for an entire population. Worse still: she and her neighbors are carriers of a deadly sickness, abandoned here by a civilization that chose quarantine over eradication. The truth she sought doesn't free her. It traps her in a more terrible knowledge. Cox builds his dystopia with cold precision: the comfortable myth of Rythar, the terror of what lies above the clouds, the impossible choice between comfortable ignorance and devastating truth. This is SF that asks whether humanity truly wants freedom, or merely wants to escape the cage without seeing its bars.