Sixty-two days after the lights went out, Xavier Miranda is alone in the Grand Canyon with a recurve bow, his dead father's .45, and a seep of water that gives up one cup an hour.
Then he hears a woman's voice in the rock.
Every instinct says it's an echo. Every instinct says that if it isn't, it's bait. He goes anyway.
What he finds is a woman sealed behind a steel grate at the bottom of a century-old copper mine, a seven-year-old girl who has been living in the dark since February, and a man who saw the collapse coming and decided the best shelter in the Southwest was worth trapping three people to keep.
Above them, two camps of starving survivors are circling the same hole in the ground. Winter is eleven weeks out. The mine holds ninety people. There are two hundred and sixty on the saddle.
Somebody has to decide who goes in. And somebody has to decide who decides.