Ashborn

The truth was always survivable. Hiding it wasn't.
For three hundred years, the generation ship Meridian Ark has drifted through the dark, its population sorted at birth into nine rigid Tiers the ruling Spire at the top, the Ashfolk who keep the air breathable and the water clean at the very bottom. Kessa Vane has spent twenty-three years down there, unclogging vents nobody upstairs ever sees, believing like everyone else on her deck that scarcity is simply the shape of the universe.

Then she finds a data core buried in a maintenance shaft, and the universe stops making sense.
Forty-one years ago, the Ark found a world it could land on. Whole. Breathable. Waiting. Someone at the very top decided three hundred thousand people didn't need to know because a planet doesn't just end a scarcity problem. It ends the whole system built on top of it.
Now Kessa has one advantage nobody in the Spire ever accounted for: she understands this ship's guts better than anyone who's ever run it. And she's about to use every pipe, every vent, and every person willing to risk everything alongside her to drag a hundred and sixty years of buried truth into the light before the people protecting it bury her too.

A dystopian space opera about power, scarcity, and the cost of a secret three generations tried to keep. If you loved the systemic unraveling of Red Rising or the class-conscious stakes of Snowpiercer, Ashborn asks a sharper question: what happens when the person who finally finds the truth was never supposed to be smart enough, or important enough, to find it at all?