Fireseed One

What if the only person who could help you save the world was your very worst enemy?

The year is 2089. Temperate climate has replaced Arctic ice, and much of what is now the United States is a lethal Hotzone, cut off by an insurmountable border from its northern, luckier neighbors, Ocean and Land Dominion. It is rumored that roving nomads will kill for a water pellet or a slice of insect loaf, and that the ZWC, a dangerous Hotzone activist group, has infiltrated the border to the northern Dominions.

Up in Ocean Dominion, all eighteen year-old Varik Teitur wants to do is party on SnowAngel Island with his friend Audun and flirt with college girls he dreams of joining next year in his quest to become a doctor. Instead, he inherits a vast sea farm, following the death of his father, famous marine biologist Professor Teitur. Five weeks later, ZWC member Marisa Baron breaks into the farm’s secret seed vault and a fellow activist poisons the farm’s agar crops, the world’s food source. In order to save the last agar seedlings Varik is forced to journey to the Hotzone in search of Fireseed, a plant his father supposedly developed with magical hybridization properties.

Varik takes Marisa along. Aside from being a terrorist, she’s the beautiful, estranged daughter of Melvyn Baron, the biggest real estate mogul in Land Dominion, and the professor’s old rival. Oddly, she knows lots about Fireseed, and which land Professor Teitur bought to test the crop, before becoming embittered and trashing the project. No one except Varik knows whether Fireseed ever existed off the drawing board. Might the refugees in Vegas-by-the-Sea have answers, or the bizarre Fireseed cult in the Chihuahua desert that worships Varik’s dead father? Varik, the reluctant hero, must risk burning in the Hotzone, as his mother did, to save the ailing agar, and the world. Fans of Under The Never Sky and Divergent will likely enjoy this read, as well as those who like a generous dash of romance with their thrillers. YA with crossover appeal, and nine interior Illustrations by the author.