Lee Brownfield

Who controls reality? And how? Ask the timedivers who ride the paths of time, manipulate cultures, lift and cast down civilizations in their corner of the galaxy. They are the Temporal Guard at Quest, the single city of the Immortals of Query, that hidden planet circling a very ordinary yellow sun in a very ordinary galaxy. This is the story of the timediver Loki, and of the unending war for control of reality in that galaxy.

The duke of the powerful House Hauteclare is the first to die. With my dagger in his back. He didn't see it coming. Didn't anticipate the bastard daughter who was supposed to die with her mother—on his order. He should have left us with the rest of the Station's starving, commoner rubbish.

Just a generation ago this place was called America. Now, after the worldwide implementation of UN-lead program called Agenda 21, it's simply known as the 'Republic'. There is no president. No congress. No Supreme Court. No freedom. There are only the Authorities. Citizens have two primary goals in the new Republic: to create clean energy and to create new human life. Those who cannot do either are of no use to society. This bleak and barren existence is all that 18-year-old Emmeline has ever known.

The gigantic comet had slammed into Earth, forging earthquakes a thousand times too powerful to measure on the Richter scale, tidal waves thousands of feet high. Cities were turned into oceans; oceans turned into steam. It was the beginning of a new Ice Age and the end of civilization. But for the terrified men and women chance had saved, it was also the dawn of a new struggle for survival--a struggle more dangerous and challenging than any they had ever known....