2060

For twenty-one years, an asteroid storm has battered Earth, cutting off the colony on Mars and giving the government its mandate to ban elevators, electric heat, and space travel.

Nineteen-year-old Alex Bontari is the best mechanic on a New Jersey oil rig and the loneliest man in Manhattan. Then an old-time New Yorker named Frank Ferguson leads him through a door behind a bookcase and into the sealed subway tunnels, where a resistance called the Last Generation swears the storm is no accident: the government is pulling the rocks down with a massive magnet. Ferguson is building a ship to destroy it, and he needs a mechanic.

Alex says yes. But aboveground, his boss makes him the rig's enforcer: fire one coworker every week, or watch his best friend lose his job too. Worse, Alex is good at it.