Great first chapter. I ran out of time today before I could finish it but the initial segment where Cora met the engineer was a grabber. I absolutely had to finish it despite needing to be elsewhere. I do hope Cora will be a major character in the rest of the story because I’m already rooting for her.

One minor flaw that you might want to fix. The phrase "the hippocampus of her brain stem was taking a slow breath," is inaccurate. The hippocampus is a portion of the medial temporal lobe, situated well above the highest level of the brainstem. Why not substitute the portion of the autonomic NS that tends to work against the adrenalin-secreting sympathetic nervous system? The phrase would then read: "her parasympathetic nerves reined in her adrenal gland," or "her hypothalamus told her lungs, ’take a slow breath," or some such.