The world has ended.
Along with other scattered survivors, astronaut Cynthia Han and the remainder of ISS Expedition 81 have finally learned what happened to the people they’d left behind, and it’s worse than any of them could have imagined.
But even if life as Cynthia knew it is over, her struggles most certainly are not. Joshua Lamb, granted strange and inhuman abilities even as civilization died around him, directs his zealots to scoop up every pocket of survivors, to offer them the simplest choice: Join or die. The nightmarish Crooked Men still hunt the darkened, hollowed cityscapes. And towering over it all, the mind-breaking obelisks with their unreadable alien message.
At stake are not just the lives of Cynthia and her companions, but the last flickering embers of the human race. To succeed, she must not only learn the true purpose of the obelisks; she must come to understand that the worst of humanity’s instincts and sins were never limited to us alone.
Ari Marmell is the author of the Mick Oberon urban fantasy series, the Widdershins YA fantasy series, and many others, alongside novels in Magic: the Gathering and the video game Darksiders, as well as writing for several roleplaying games.
Cindy Kay is a Chinese Thai American narrator and educator who grew up in the California Bay Area and lives in the Rockies. Her work has been described as listening to a “cozy best friend.” She narrates fiction and nonfiction, and has studied Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, and Japanese.