Would you allow the military to reanimate your corpse, knowing it would commit atrocities, if it meant avoiding service in a brutal war during your lifetime?
What if your level of citizenship depended on your answer? To gain a chance at a better life, or feed your family, which would you choose then? Or would you choose neither, and accept a life of hardship and poverty?
What if you came face to face with your own death, and realized too late you had made the wrong decision?
Nico Wachalowski is a war veteran. That makes him a first-tier citizen. Formerly a police detective, he has reintegrated into civilian life as an agent in the FBI. During his time in the war, he encountered the reanimated soldiers known as ‘revivors’ many times. When they begin to turn up inside the city, he is tapped for his expertise in a field he’d rather leave behind.
Faye Dasalia is a police detective. She and Nico worked together long ago, but while he decided to serve, she opted to be wired for reanimation. That makes her a second-tier citizen. In the course of investigating a string of murders, she stumbles on a situation that brings her face to face with the revivors she will one day become herself.
Calliope Flax refused to serve. She also refused to be wired for reanimation. That makes her a third-tier citizen. As a result, she ekes a living in a housing project which has been mostly abandoned. Highly taxed, and with few rights, she seems to be on a path of self-destruction until circumstance drops her in the middle of the biggest terrorist plot the country has ever known.
Zoe Ott is a third-tier citizen as well, but unlike Calliope, she was born with a gift. Zoe can manipulate the thoughts of others. This ability allows her to live above the poverty line, but just barely. The gift also comes at a price; she is constantly assaulted with visions from both the past and future, with no way of knowing which is which. In the depths of late-stage alcoholism, she has long since stopped trying to make sense of it all when a particularly persistent vision prompts her to contact Nico just as events begin to unfold.
The four are drawn together by circumstances which at first seem unrelated. By the time they realize their fates are connected to a fifth, unseen enemy, that enemy has nearly gathered the power to strike a blow that has the potential to change everything, forever.
