In 2256, a century since the great thaw and decades after the blessed refreeze, Mathew Jansing, a reserved, environmental biologist and childhood amnesiac, believes humanity will again leave the envirodomes.
During an altercation with his celebrity mother, Matt accidently kills her in self-defense, but the borough will never believe his innocence. He flees the envirodome in an aerobus for the poisonous badlands of Tennessee.
He encounters unreported rejuvenation and breathable air. Why would scientists keep this secret? Matt discovers a fugitive woman, Ellen Fitzgerald, hiding in the Smokies. She shares food, and when police storm the forest, they hold up in an underground bunker.
Matt doesn’t know it, but he’s been found guilty in absentia, and both the police and his mother’s revolutionary group, led by Norbert Buckson, want him dead. Norbert intends to overthrow the North American envirodomes with military robots and has sent Ellen to bring Matt back.
Borough police capture and imprison Matt and Ellen. In the face of his execution—if he can stay alive—he intends to do the following: learn why his mother tried to kill him, clear his name, and share the secret Tennessee rejuvenation. But the revolution is coming, and he might be too late.
L. K. Pinaire 