The Air Garden Keeper
A Generation Ship Story

About this book:

On the generation ship *Vanguard*, the air isn't free—it's farmed. Twelve-year-old Phoebe Mercer tends the vast, rotating canopy that scrubs carbon from two thousand lungs, trading sweat and vigilance for every breath. She knows the rhythm of the leaves, the hum of the scrubbers, the exact taste of clean oxygen. But when a sweet, almond scent drifts through the fern vaults and the green walls begin to weep grey sludge, Phoebe discovers a canister dosing the ship's lungs with a long-banned defoliant. Someone is poisoning the garden. And with the Director demanding paperwork over truth, the only people who believe her are a crippled uncle in a control shack and a handful of stolen samples.

As the canopy withers sector by sector, Phoebe hunts a saboteur through ventilation ducts and hydroponic shadows, racing a chemical clock that gives the ship four weeks of reserve air—if they stop running, stop fighting, stop living. But the poison doesn't just kill plants; it dissolves the fragile trust holding the crew together. In a world where a single ruptured seal means extinction, the greatest threat isn't the vacuum outside. It's the hand turning the valve inside.

*The Air Garden Keeper* is a taut, atmospheric sci-fi thriller where botany is battle, adolescence is apprenticeship, and the line between stewardship and survival grows thinner with every breath.