Sixty years after coastal flooding swallowed the old cities, humanity's survivors live in Ember City — a sprawling, tiered metropolis built on reclaimed oil rigs and stitched together with solar bridges. Dara Mensah is the city's most gifted solar engineer, responsible for keeping the lower tiers powered while the wealthy upper tiers hoard energy. When a citywide blackout kills dozens in the lower tiers, Dara discovers the outage wasn't an accident — it was a deliberate culling, ordered by the city's Council to thin the population ahead of a resource shortage they've kept secret. As she digs deeper, Dara uncovers a buried truth about Ember City's founding that could fracture the fragile peace between the tiers forever, all while protecting her younger brother and reconnecting with the father who abandoned the lower tiers years ago to work for the Council he now serves. Across eight episodes, Dara must decide whether to expose the truth and risk citywide collapse, or work within a corrupt system to save who she can.
