Altered

PROLOGUE

THEY ABANDONED EARTH. MEN LEFT THEIR HOMES and their shops. They deserted the streets to crack and scatter into the soil, renouncing dominion over the world and rejecting their own progress for the promise of the new and the next. And so Earth sits in splendid ruin.

On the horizon a metro rises in grotesque majesty, and behind us the ocean roars with life. Above us the sky twists and turns to watch us—an evolution of stars and light. I know little of this world, but hope gathers in my chest. This is our first chance. Maybe our only one.

Life.

Possibility.

Choice.

I’d been taught there was one reality: a reality guided and overseen and created by others. But standing on the edge of the past, I feel potential coursing through me. The natural strands of life are free here, glorious and unrestrained. Time slides around and wraps me in its protection. Anything can happen, and I feel the pulsing vitality of this truth in my arms and in my aching hands. Loricel was wrong about Earth and what it represents. She told me it was dead, a half-remembered relic of a different time, but this world isn’t doomed.

It’s waiting for me.