Sophie and Emanuel had been hired by NASA a month after the sunspots were discovered. With her expertise in solar weather and Emanuel’s experience studying the effect of storms on animals, they were an obvious choice. And it had more than likely saved their lives.

They were flown out to Houston and assigned to a research facility at Johnson Space Center, where they worked in an EMP-resistant bunker, the perfect place to ride out the most violent solar storm in recorded history.

But as Sophie and Emanuel stood on the roof of the observatory with the rest of the staff, they didn’t exactly feel safe. The sky was getting more active, the crimson more vibrant and profound. It took on an eerie glow.

Early reports streaming out of computers around the world indicated the storms were more powerful than originally thought. The magnetic readings were off the charts, unlike anything the scientific community had seen. And the storm was lasting longer than predicted. Something was feeding it, giving it more juice.

Sophie had noticed an anomaly early on, spikes of radiation coming from Mars, but she hadn’t had a chance to research what it meant, if anything, before the storms hit. Now, she wondered whether her anomaly had something to do with it—whether Mars could have been the source of the storm after all.

The world had been caught off guard, and just when President Bolton decided to finally hold a press conference to discuss the rare event, the solar flares were accompanied by the largest coronal mass ejection the Earth had ever experienced, bringing with it a dose of cosmic radiation stronger than all of the world’s nuclear weapons combined. The solar wind carried the ejection straight through Earth’s upper atmosphere, cutting it like a scalpel. It made landfall outside Chicago before evacuations could even be ordered.

Most scientists had argued this could never happen, but like many scientists before them, they were wrong.

Sophie had had a front-row seat to the destruction. With Emanuel by her side, she had watched in horror as the swirling red flares licked the sky.

By the time the emergency broadcast system began issuing alerts, it was too late for those living in the Midwest dead zone; transformers and power lines in every major city west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains were lighting up like bottle rockets. The result was massive fires raging out of control. They were too much for fire departments to handle. Within hours, entire cities were burning.

Emanuel had grabbed Sophie’s hand when the first transformer exploded, sending a spire of flame into the air somewhere in the middle of South Houston. Another pop followed a few seconds later, and before long the entire city sounded like it was having a massive Fourth of July celebration.

When the air raid sirens went off, Emanuel clenched her hand even tighter. The sirens made an odd sound—an archaic sound, one that seemed as if it should be reserved for a twentieth-century action movie with nuclear missiles raining down from the sky. As Sophie surveyed the horizon, she realized something much worse than nuclear-tipped missiles was raining down on them. This was hell itself.