In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while an ecological crisis looms. America is battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to cast of characters—a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.
From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington DC, their stories unfold against a backdrop of accelerating chaos as they summon up courage, galvanize a nation, fall to their own fear, and find hope in the face of staggering odds. Each faces a reckoning: what will they sacrifice to salvage humanity’s last chance of a future?
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