Project Mycelium runs on two settlements that never agree with each other, even when they're not talking.
Haven runs on cultured light panels, requisition stacks, and an organization called Continuance that decides who gets to leave. It is orderly, rationed, and — depending who you ask — either the reason anyone survived the Bloom at all, or a cage with better lighting than most cages get.
Bellweather is an Appalachian town the new world somehow never managed to destroy. It doesn't run on an organization. It runs on something closer to consensus, or tradition, or — depending who you ask — a kind of freedom nobody's ever actually had to define out loud, because nobody's had to yet.
Mara grew up in one and built a career in the other. Neither settlement is right. That's more or less the point. I didn't want to write a book where survival meant picking the correct system — I wanted to write one where every system, chosen or imposed, has a cost somebody eventually has to pay, and the interesting question is who, and whether they knew the price going in.
Book I doesn't resolve that question. Neither does Book II. I'm not sure the series resolves it at all, and I've made my peace with that.
— C. W. Lindmere