Frontiers of the EMP

When the lights die, the whole world dies with them. Dana Thompson has already lost everyone she loves. Her parents. Her sister. Her father, who pressed a small dark drive into her hand with his dying breath and told her to carry it south, to the center, to the free people who could use it to turn the world back on.

That drive holds the complete knowledge of how to rebuild the electric world from nothing. And every roused enemy on the ruined continent wants it.

At a river crossing at dawn, a gun leveled at her chest, Dana meets Ryler. A weathered killer haunted by the woman he lost and the terrible things grief made him do. He should turn her in for the bounty. Instead he stakes his own life on hers, and everything changes. What grows between them across a thousand hunted miles becomes the one warm thing in a cold world, and the reason Dana finally lets down a wall nine years in the building.

But the road will test them both. The Continental Reclamation Authority wants to chain the light and rule everyone who needs it. A rising warlord named Vane is building a false nation out of free guns, free drugs, and a promise of cities, drawing the desperate to him by the thousands. And between Dana and the far western mountains lies a gauntlet of rivers, swamps, and deserts, of gates held by strangers who might save her or sell her.

One by one, others gather around Dana and the light she carries. A red-bearded warrior-priest. A wounded friend she refuses to abandon. A turned assassin searching for the way back. A small nation on the move, marching toward a hidden facility on the northern California coast where the true world waits to be born.

But an old woman with sight has already warned her of the price. Dana will reach the end of the road. She will found the world that comes after. And someone she loves will not live to see it.