Two thousand years prior to the time of the story, the Verdi were driven underground into bunker cities after a catastrophic war stopped and then reversed the rotation of the planet and rendered the surface deadly to all life. Wendohl conceives of a think tank of the city’s brightest, the Extended Life Project, to find a way to escape the clutches of the dead planet—but something has gone wrong, and Zenik, her Security Advisor, finds himself trapped in an empty Project.