Following the events of Seared into Shadow, Victoria Wight and Sarintha Malik are raising twins mere miles from the Accident Zone, where modern technology is still continuing to fail, leaving the city of Macallister in chaos. The children grow up under surveillance, while elsewhere in the city, the Occult prepares to make another attack. Can the teenaged twins evade both the government that wants to study them and the cult members who want to use them to bring an old enemy back to power?

This is the second book in a trilogy detailing the battle for the future of the city of Macallister and the very souls of its residents.
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On the edge of a normal city rose a pile of wreckage against than the distant mountains. Nearby, the skeletons of buildings loomed higher than Sam could have imagined. Further to the south was a crushed and melted void. His mind couldn't comprehend the destruction of it all, rejecting it with such a severe shock.

He was as drawn to it as he was horrified. It seemed like some ancient graveyard, yet surely it was related to the Accident his mother sometimes spoke of in a hushed voice. He'd been so close to this disaster all along and never known it, but now he knew it bore a special significance.

Coils of rusting barbed wire fencing lay long abandoned, either never to be erected or never repaired. He imagined the workers couldn't stay a minute longer in this cursed place and assumed no one else could either. Many of the buildings had long since fallen; the workers had gone away to more tenable projects. Not a sound rose in the still air.

Farther out, not a light shone, yet it wasn't dark. No, in his mind's eye there was a sort of soft luminescence that radiated from the flattened center, as if the place had its own moon, which had exploded along with it but left its ghostly light dissipated throughout.

He was walking closer without knowing it, navigating the partially cleared wreckage instinctively, as if he knew his destination. He closed his eyes briefly and stopped over a dark spot in the concrete. He watched it intently. It seemed to flutter and twist before regaining its original human shape: a shadow of a dead soul burned into the pavement.

Sickened, he hurried away.

The power here was enormous, alluring and dangerous, and he could feel it sucking him in. His alarm was fading, and he was growing numb. He became so tired and distant that he let it in. He felt someone was watching him, but it was more like the entire place was watching him, filling him and emptying him at the same time.

His feet led him to a clearing near a mound of fertile dirt that sharply contrasted with the concrete bits around it. It was a bushy tree not a lot taller than he was, with a single fruit near the top. It must have been planted as a memorial. It was the only living thing in this place besides himself.

The pomegranate was sunset-colored, the only spot of brightness in this bleakness, and he longed to reach for it. The more he looked at it, the hungrier he became, until he found himself stretching his arm up toward it, the lower branches jabbing his legs, and as he touched its rough flesh, something round and cold pressed into the back of his head.