Breakers

In upstate Idaho, Ness Hook is run out of his mom's house by his bullying brother Shawn. In Redding, California, Tristan Carter is graduating college, but with no job and no prospects, she'll have to move back in with her parents.

Then the world ends.

After Ness discovers his best friend dead of disease, Shawn takes their family to the mountains to wait out the plague. As Tristan's parents fall sick, she's left to care for her younger brother Alden. Both sets of siblings dig in for the long haul. Humanity is reduced to splinters. And then the creatures who sent the virus appear in the sky.

Flushed from the mountains, Shawn and Ness join a tribe at a nuclear power plant, where they plan to launch a guerrilla war against the invaders. In California, Tristan and Alden are taken prisoner. Separated from her brother, Tristan crosses the ruins of America to track him down. She will stop at nothing to get Alden back--but her fellow survivors prove even more dangerous than the monsters who broke the world.

Raina was just a girl when the plague came. She survived. Her parents didn't. Neither did the world. As civilization fell, she took to the ruins of Los Angeles, eating whatever she could catch.

After two years alone, she's found and adopted by a fisherman and his wife. Their makeshift family lives a quiet life—until a man named Karslaw sails in from Catalina Island with an army of conquerors. Driven by visions of empire, he executes Raina's new father as a traitor and takes her mother captive.

But Karslaw's people aren't the only ones vying for control of the ruined land. As violence wracks the city, Raina joins a rebellion against Karslaw's rule. She will stop at nothing to free her mother—and to have her revenge.

This is the sequel to the New York Times bestselling WOOL series. It combines the three Shift books into a single e-book in order to save the reader a few bucks. The saga concludes with DUST, which will be available in late 2013.

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In 2007, the Center for Automation in Nanobiotech (CAN) outlined the hardware and software platform that would one day allow robots smaller than human cells to make medical diagnoses, conduct repairs, and even self-propagate.

In the same year, the CBS network re-aired a program about the effects of propranolol on sufferers of extreme trauma. A simple pill, it had been discovered, could wipe out the memory of any traumatic event.

At almost the same moment in humanity’s broad history, mankind had discovered the means for bringing about its utter downfall. And the ability to forget it ever happened.

When the sun takes 16 years to cross the sky, the night lasts just as long. As twilight approaches, entire kingdoms must scramble to stay ahead of the lasting darkness and the creatures that live there. It's easy for things to go missing in the chaos--and it's Chief Tracker Vickory Carroway's job to find them.

But not all things are created equal. The king's daughter Dalia has run away. It's believed she's traveled to the Lightless--and if Vickory can't bring her home, he'll be executed. In desperation, he enlists the help of Tom Raquepaw. Outlaw. Sorcerer. And the only man known to have traveled to the Lightless and made it back alive.

They won't have long to track Dalia down. Spend more than a couple weeks in the darkness, and you can never touch sunlight again. If they can't find her in the next few days, Dalia will be lost to the Lightless forever.

Lightless is a novella of about 60 pages.

Five hundred of us were sent to colonize this planet. Only fifty or so survived.

We woke up fifteen years too early, we had only half our training, and they expected us to not only survive ... they expected us to conquer this place.

The problem is: it isn't safe here.

We aren't even safe from each other.

At Mile 81 on the Maine turnpike is a boarded up rest stop, a place where high school kids drink and get into the kind of trouble high school kids have always gotten into. It’s the place where Pete Simmons goes when his older brother, who’s supposed to be looking out for him, heads off to the gravel pit to play “paratroopers over the side.” Pete, armed only with the magnifying glass he got for his tenth birthday, finds a discarded bottle of vodka in the boarded up burger shack and drinks enough to pass out.

Not much later, a mud-covered station wagon (which is strange because there hadn’t been any rain in New England for over a week) veers into the Mile 81 rest area, ignoring the sign that says “closed, no services.” The driver’s door opens but nobody gets out.

Doug Clayton, an insurance man from Bangor, is driving his Prius to a conference in Portland. On the backseat are his briefcase and suitcase and in the passenger bucket is a King James Bible, what Doug calls “the ultimate insurance manual,” but it isn’t going to save Doug when he decides to be the Good Samaritan and help the guy in the broken down wagon. He pulls up behind it, puts on his four-ways, and then notices that the wagon has no plates.