Barely having known her father, with a mother who doesn’t notice her, Terry grows up contrarian, her feet planted on the ground in the City, where everyone’s heads are in the sky. Her rebelliousness gets her in trouble – until the task force is sent to eliminate her.
“The cameras aren’t watching you. You’re watching yourself.”
Terry Silver doesn’t know she’s living a lie. Despite the feisty attitude that angers her university teachers, she’s unaware of the dissentious thoughts erased from her mind, or the half-truths fed to millions of Seranidians to maintain the paradise of the City. Even, of the fact that she may have taken a life.
But when the mysterious Professor Camus Remin whisks her from the crosshairs of Seranid's elite killing squad and into Slums, she finds stolen memories, including ones of her long-dead father, and a people trampled by innovation, who call her the Phoenix that will herald the rebirth of the nation.
As Terry tries to foment an uprising, she faces more than her own mortality: resurfacing trauma, the deaths of loved ones, and the looming threat of an all-out nuclear war. She’s forced to ask herself: what price would you pay for change?
Divide and conquer.
Seranid’s government rules through disunity. The priviledged: doctors, engineers, teachers, and scientists, are kept in the paradisial City, while the rest are fill the Slums, where poverty, disease, and corruption run rampant.
Status symbols implanted at birth label Seranidians and alter their thoughts and memories to keep them in line. Spydrs, insect-like droids, maintain constant surveillance, and alter physical evidence. The task force eliminates any remaining rebels.
The Council, the coalition of the six business heads of Seranid, is the guiding force and source of comfort in many Seranidian’s lives. From controlling the weather in the City to providing aid to those in need, they are the sympathetic heart of Seranid. And the driver behind the City’s endless consumerism.
Characters
Setting
North America, in the distant future…
Three countries share the continent: materialistic Seranid to the West, militaristic Leifen to the East, and modest Mirena, caught between the two. Each has their own way of surviving in this cruel new world, and each their own hidden flaws.
Seranid boasts bold innovation, yet the Slums, where the workers are hidden, share more with Mirena's villages than the City's skyscrapers.
CITY OF SERANID
It was a warm summer night, the kind of night engineered by the Council to please the City residents, the kind of night where families gathered to eat outdoors, their meals burnished by the bare light bulbs and candles. Camus walked down University Avenue. Neon advertisements screamed at him from the blue and green cell-shaped buildings, but he paid them no heed, staring at the ground, speaking to no one.
Terry and Camus's home, the City is brash and materialistic, isolated from the world by the Biodome. No one inside knows what lies beyond.
SLUMS OF SERANID
We crossed one of the ragged wood-and-rope bridges tying together the shanty towns that grew like weeds. As I wheezed I found myself staring at the homes the people had crafted — rusting trailers, patchwork metal monsters, castles built of cracked wood just barely nailed together. The only real buildings were the factories: hulking beasts of the same self-cleaning concrete of the City towers, coated in a layer of coal ash.
The Slums sprawl beyond the Biodome. Rumor has it that the worst are banished here — but no one from the City has stepped foot inside.
LEIFEN
Like Seranid, Leifen’s capital was prosperous, busy, and for the most part clean. But that was where the similarities ended. Instead of curved cells, Leifen’s buildings were blocks and needles of steel, glass, and concrete, squatting by the road or piercing the air, free of holographic advertisements and neon signs. The no-nonsense, cookie cutter residences and apartments repeated to infinity down every sideroad.
Two hundred years ago, Seranid freed itself from Leifen's tyranny. Since then, the two countries have been at odds: any Seranidian who sets foot on Leifen soil will be captured — and executed.
MIRENA
The pavement was awash with patches of crimson, sunny yellow, and fiery orange, from the paper banners that caught the setting sun’s golden light, and the curtains that flapped in the warm dusk breeze. Over the hum of our bikes, I could make out a few cheerful notes — guitars accompanied by pianos or a human voice. We followed the sound of laughter to a side street. There, a woman scarcely taller than I was swept the road with a straw broom.
Built from the ravaged land left by Seranid's War for Independence, Mirena is crushed between two superpowers. Yet here hope continues to live.
