No Stars, No Ceiling

Bex Hardacre has one thing left: a dying observatory in the high desert her grandfather welded together himself, and a hand-drawn map of the sky nobody has ever seen. Kade Vasquez has one job: make the place too expensive to keep, so the consortium can drown the stars in light and buy the land cheap. Then the storm takes the airstrip. No road. No signal. One working room, one bedroll, and no way to avoid each other. They play cards. They lie. They each keep one secret they can't afford to say out loud — and every night it gets harder to remember which one. When the second team arrives, Kade has to choose between the contract in his pocket and the woman who catalogues the sky by hand. No stars. No ceiling. No way out but through each other.