Terarque and Minarque: two politically opposed continents, but interdependent.

Only Minarque technology is able to channel water from another planet, Phalem.

Only Terarque's solution to the extinction of bees and the climate change, human pollinators, can provide food. A big continent with an oppressed people dominated by a small one with an advanced technology are in an unbalanced struggle for power.

In this setting happens the Collapse, the planet ring falls and destroys Minarque, pushing its people to run away toward the ones they oppressed. Nathanael is one of them, with him his two children. His wife, a scientist, is on mission on Phalem. Confronted to the hardships of the migrants camps, he is far from the political plots stirring in Terarque.

Terarque President, Charles Vermès, has obtained full powers to handle the crisis. Among the population is Ellyn Nivet, a ward of the nation after a disaster that happened fifteen years earlier and destroyed the Pillar, huge structure designed to regulate the climate. The young woman is part of a team who works again on site. Grateful to have been taken care of all those years, she blindly follows any of the government's decision. She is used by Vermès as role-model for the other workers.

Mathieu Estur, head of the union of Minarque's firms, is, too, a refugee but quickly succeeds to take a more and more important place on the political stage, each day more complicated. Another contestant for power is Bruno Roy, former President of Minarque judged responsible for the Pillar disaster. A political game is set, each player waiting the best time to give the perfect blow.

At Estur initiative, a mission to go on Phalem to collect water while the Pillar is built. For it, some Minarquians of his former company are selected, but Nathanael is not among them. Hopeless, he tries everything, leaving his children at the camp and joins Terarque's Capital. There, he is met by Manu, a former colleague of Ellyn actively against the government, who helps refugees.

Everything is played during a gala evening organised by Estur. He wants to announced the solution he found to the migrant issue, they just have to send them all on Phallem. Nathanael, on his part, succeeds to make contact with his wife, learns that her life was attempted and that she made a life-changing discovery. She gives him all the information on a piece of Minarque technology, without telling him what it is. Ellyn, on her side, meets a scientist who worked with her parents, Bernard Vialla, and Manu is killed trying to save Nathanael.

Despite their differences, Nathanael and Ellyn, more and more shaken in her beliefs, do their best to find Vialla and understand what happened at the Pillar fifteen year ago. They also try to decode the informations Sybille transmitted to her husband. With Vialla's help, they go to the ruins of the old pillar and find the technology they need. Ellyn discovers then that her necklace is the same object as the informations given to Nathanael and holds documents left by her parents able to defeat Bruno Roy. The discovery Sybille made on Phallem, despite the existence of bees, is a water lily able to purify water.

Ellyn, along with a friend of Nathanael and his two children, decide on their own to join the first spacecraft to Phallem, where they meet Sybille and other scientist. Ellyn goes back with bees and water lilies, decided to change Terarque, despite the political obstacles, whereas Sybille waits for Nathanael on this newly colonised planet.