This critically examined novel, released concurrently with the inaugural Saint-Germain volume, presents a narrative that is both somber and structurally flawed. Its desolate undertone stems from its setting in a post-apocalyptic world, which offers no glimmer of hope for humanity's future. The structural weakness arises from the author's attempt to stretch the original story into a full-length composition.

In this tale, Doomsday has arrived, yet the specifics remain elusive. Extreme pollution pervades, forcing plants and animals into bizarre adaptations over time. Towering Ponderosa pines have turned a foreboding red, while venomous water spiders—eerily reminiscent of scorpions—congregate around water sources, delivering swift and agonizing death with their stings. Peril lurks in every corner where humans dwell. The narrative unfolds in California, with ruthless motorcycle gangs, whose ferocity echoes the Mongols, marauding the landscape. Paul Walker lamented in Galaxy that while an army seems to loom, ultimately only a few are thwarted by the central duo, both mutants for reasons unknown to the readers.

Thea, a young woman born in 1986, now finds herself at twenty-six years old. She became a mutant, likely due to parental consent, as part of an experiment to engineer diverse mutants—or "mutes"—capable of thriving better than regular humans in the post-apocalyptic realm. Thea possesses a nictitating membrane in her eye—useless to most—but more crucially, she and her male companion Evan can regenerate tissue. Remarkably, in Evan's case, this extends to bone regeneration; after losing an arm to the Pirates, it astonishingly regrows. Throughout the novel's nearly 200 pages, they traverse the desolate Western mountains in search of refuge, relentlessly pursued by homicidal maniacs that seem to populate every era in Yarbro's universe. Besides the Pirates, they face cannibals and fanatical monks intent on their destruction. Gretchen Rix, in Science Fiction Review, criticized the novel's "gimmicky villains" as a primary flaw, although others cite a more extensive list of issues.