Story so far

After the events of Leviathan Wakes — the Eros atrocity, the death of the detective Miller, and the protomolecule's fall to Venus where it is alive and building — the alien threat has not ended, only moved. This second book opens far from Venus, in the lush deep corridors of Ganymede, the breadbasket moon of the outer planets, through the eyes of a four-year-old girl named Mei. Mei is a bright, stubborn child who soothes herself by reciting the Latin names of the station's plants, a habit that delights her botanist father. Her mother has gone to Ceres for time alone, so when her physician, the big, salt-smelling Doctor Strickland, collects her from her Montessori school promising to take her to her mother, Mei goes willingly, trusting the man who has treated her chronic immune condition all her life. But Strickland, together with a cold, pretty, skinny-fingered woman named Umea, does not take her to any hospital. They carry her through Ganymede's abandoned surface tubes — older, dirtier, disused — into a hidden facility sealed behind an old-fashioned airlock, where other children, including a boy named Sandro, are already being held. Skipping his usual medical questions, Strickland tells Umea things are "good to go" and to "release it," then leaves. Umea, dropping her polite mask, leads Mei into a frigid room dominated by a great dry glass tank. Inside sits a naked man whose skin is not skin, whose hands are deformed, and whose eyes glow blue as if lit by fire within. As the thing reaches toward the glass, Mei begins to scream — and the reader recognizes, with dread, the unmistakable signature of the protomolecule.