Light Music — Kathleen Ann Goonan

Once the world worked differently -- before "the Silence" from space quieted the airwaves.

Once there was a haven called Crescent City, built through the wonders of nanotechnology to transport its enlightened inhabitants into the cosmos. But humanity has failed the city.

Dania Cooper, a brilliant scientist and resilient survivor, and Jason Peabody, a recipient of the DNA-altering virus affecting a remarkable few who were born at the Silence's onset, must now flee the sentient metropolis -- embarking on a bizarre odyssey across a perilous, unrecognizable landscape of tragically "youngening" children, of plague-ravaged humans in foreboding "flower cities," of conscious machines and talking animals. For a world that is not as it was is on the brink of yet another astonishing transformation -- either by grand design or random cosmic accident.