The Phage

Everyone is gone. Something else has taken their place.

The phones are dead. The TVs hiss static. At a party no one else made it to, Alicia Ramble finds a body, a basement running with water, and a creature with eyes like dark stars.

Alicia is cold, logical, and armed. Chelsea Diallo is terrified, relentlessly talkative, and absolutely not built for this. They barely know each other, and now they may be the only two people left. Then a boy in ancient dress appears in a hospital cafeteria, begging for help in a language neither of them speaks, while shadows chant behind him.

The old stories have names for what's hunting them: the ijiraq, the pukwudgies, the howlers that scream through the tunnels. Behind them waits something worse. Neluieteapa, the phage, is the thing that devours, and it is eating space and time itself.

With geography warping and the dark closing in, Alicia and Chelsea must cross a collapsing continent with a stranger from another age. The only place left to stop the phage is a sacred shore thousands of miles away, and a war between two godlike brothers is being fought over the road to it.

If they fail, no one will ever know they tried.