A murderer stalks the post-apocalyptic wilderness of the Pacific Northwest.
A year after the outbreak and nuclear war, the planet is teetering on the edge of environmental collapse. Across the entire Northern Hemisphere, very few survived. Fourteen thousand Europeans and Canadians found safety behind the great defensive walls erected across Nova Scotia. Attacked by piratical bandits based out of New York, they have no choice but to flee. While Bill Wright organises their evacuation, Kim and Sholto remain in the Pacific Northwest, searching for a new home for all those in the east. They think they have months to prepare until a plane full of pilgrims arrives from the south, bringing a murderer with them.
Where the evacuation of Britain was a bloodbath, the Southern Pacific fared better. Survivors thrive in fortified enclaves in Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Thousands of Canadians found a new home in Australia's Northern Territory, albeit living in hastily built shanty towns where water is scarce and crime is rife. The existential uncertainty born out of the mushroom clouds, the undead, and the collapse of the old civilisation has led to the rise of religious extremists, death cults, and opportunistic warlords. To maintain order among the enclave communities, a multi-faith pilgrimage to Rome, Jerusalem, and Mecca is announced. Pilgrims will fly to Canada and use the ships the Europeans crossed the Atlantic in to sail back to the Mediterranean and so to the Holy Land.
After the attempted murder of the pilgrims' leadership, it is clear that some in the Pacific want both the pilgrimage and the community in Canada to fail. The number of suspects is limited, but to conduct an investigation, they will need forensic equipment, and that can only be found in a sealed city, still full of the undead.
Whoever the killers are, their backers are still in Australia. Finding them falls to Commissioner Tess Qwong, whose hunt takes her from crocodile-filled rivers to the densely packed shanty towns the exiled Canadians call home.
Set among the radioactive desolation of British Columbia, the undead-filled ruins of Washington State, and the exiled Canadians' capital in Australia's Northern Territory, Bill and Kim's dreams of creating a new and better world are fading, while the prospect of war only grows stronger.
