In 2025 California, small walled communities must protect themselves from hordes of desperate scavengers and roaming bands of people addicted to a drug that activates an orgasmic desire to burn, rape, and murder. When one small community is overrun, Lauren Olamina, an 18-year-old black woman with the hereditary train of "hyperempathy"--which causes her to feel others' pain as her own--sets off on foot along the dangerous coastal highways, moving north into the unknown.
From the community