This is the way the world ends:
A nuclear strike on a deep sea vent.
The target was an ancient microbe—voracious enough to drive the whole biosphere to extinction—and a handful of amphibious humans called rifters who'd inadvertently released it from three billion years of solitary confinement.
The resulting tsunami killed millions.
It's not as through there was a choice: saving the world excuses almost any degree of collateral damage.
Unless, of course, you miss the target.
Now North America's west coast lies in ruins.
Millions of refugees rally around a mythical figure mysteriously risen from the deep sea.
A world already wobbling towards collapse barely notices the spread of one more blight along its shores.
And buried in the seething fast-forward jungle that use to be called Internet, something vast and inhuman reaches out to a woman with empty white eyes and machinery in her chest.
A woman driven by rage, and incubating Armageddon.
Her name is Lenie Clarke.
She's a rifter.
She's not nearly as dead as everyone thinks.
And the whole damn world is collateral damage as far as she's concerned. . . .