Tesserae

Seattle, 2060. Twenty years after a catastrophic earthquake left her effectively an orphan, exotic-animal specialist Sasha Delescu has returned to the rebuilt city of her birth for a new job, and, she hopes, a new chance at taking on the personal demons that have dogged her since her childhood tragedy.

The job, an internship with space-exploration company Xenobiology Network, is great at first. She gets to put her education to use studying newly retrieved samples of extraterrestrial life, an...