Faded Earth

Humanity was on the cusp of greatness when the Fade began to spread. Cities fell during the decades known as the Collapse. The spread of the disease turning human beings into bloodthirsty monsters could not be stopped. It could not even be slowed. Weapons of mass destruction burned half the world down to the bedrock. Yet some survived. Using technology meant to take men to the stars and find a new home there, the immune took refuge. They were the seeds of a future not yet written. A hope for a better world. Armed and armored, they set about rebuilding from the ashes. A century later, North America is all but unrecognizable. Survival has ceased to be an idea--it is almost a religion. The needs of the many outweigh all else. This is a lesson Rebecca Park will learn in the harshest way imaginable. When her family is torn away from her, she will face a choice unlike any in her short life. Wallow in grief and fade away like so many before her have, or choose to make herself into something more. Drawn into a fight she could never have imagined, Beck will face the monstrous Pales who have overrun the badlands and the darkest parts of the people around her. It is a life few ask for. A life fewer still make it through to old age. That is how it almost always ends for those who choose to be the shield for the rest of humankind.

In the world after the Collapse, there is no lasting victory. Only the struggle. Beck Park, Deathwatch agent, has uncovered proof of a conspiracy within the oppressive Protectorate government. The goal of this cabal is stagnation through fear--controlling society into following to their decades-long plan. Though Beck and the other members of the rebellious Movement have won a skirmish against these hidden enemies, the war is far from over. Consequences can be delayed but never avoided. When the counter strike comes, no one is safe. Not the Deathwatch, nor the Movement itself. The force can only be guided and the damage focused on a sacrificial target. As a central figure in finally discovering whose hands hold the levers of power determined to crush her people into obedience, Beck is an obvious choice. If the ravenous hordes of mutated Pales don't get her, agents of the cabal will. Her only choice is to seek refuge and aid in the one place they would never expect her to go.

The fight is never over, and the board is always changing. In the isolated prison colony known as the Block, the exiled leader of the Protectorate enacts plans a decade in the making. Across the Protectorate itself, revelations about social engineering and the mass murder of citizens disguised as disease outbreaks have given rise to new political factions. Unrest is building toward a breaking point across their previously uniform and complacent society. Deathwatch agent Rebecca Park and her team have no choice but to ride the leading edge of the brewing revolution. Tasked with damping the heat of growing chaos and putting out fires when those efforts fail, Beck is pushed to the limits of her creativity and ingenuity--and beyond. Faced with an enemy bent on seizing back power and a population of citizens torn between rediscovered freedoms and the traditions that have kept them alive, only the thin black line of the Deathwatch can keep these forces from tearing everything apart.