Olena enjoys taking things apart and repurposing them. She enters the Volunteer Program, and after some coaxing, she agrees to leave to find her fortune in the stars. The fortune she gets is a grimy salvage station where family ties keep her from rising to the top, and her life is a series of endless grey days until she takes apart a chunk of debris that turns out to be a life pod. Brin Tai Wekk has been waiting for a compatible female to share the burden of the mind of a planet. When the woman who slams the lid of his capsule on his hand wakes him, he knows he has found someone capable of sharing more than her instinct for survival. A discarded career, a stolen mate and a talent for turning the obsolete into something useful track Olena to a new world with a new start.