Justin Merriwether and Rachel are trapped in dead end lives a dead end north Georgia town. They find that their isolation is very much intentional, Hartwell is a human zoological project run by a mysterious group bent on improving the human species through breeding. The fence surrounding the town is not to keep them safe, it’s to keep them in.
They escape only to find life on their own outside of Hartwell is filled with both freedom and danger.
On the outside, city states battle for control of breeders. Kidnappings, raids and outright warfare are common. The land outside the cities is barren, abandoned to the animals who also have begun to evolve as well. Particularly among them the crows.
Justin and Rachel soon find that each sanctuary is as bad as the other and vow to find a way out of the mega prison that is now the entire southeastern United States, a land controlled by an evil technocracy set out to breed a better world in their image.