Alex, a resourceful seventeen-year-old running from her incurable brain tumor, Tom, who has left the war in Afghanistan, and Ellie, an angry eight-year-old, join forces after an electromagnetic pulse sweeps through the sky and kills most of the world's population, turning some of those who remain into zombies and giving the others superhuman senses.

Sixteen-year-old Wren MacAvoy works as a coal miner for a domed city where, after 200 years, society is complacent and coal is diminishing until she unwittingly becomes a catalyst for a revolution that destroys the dome, which could mean the end of everything.