Nothing walks the black cinder of Earth except the undead leftovers, reanimated by science so advanced it may as well be magic. Twisted into unimaginable forms by flesh-shaping and machine-grafting, the undead are the only remnant of a civilization reduced to bitter ash and organic slurry. Zombies shuffle through the ruins of nuclear fire and biological warfare and far worse, alongside rusted war-machines still holding the posts of a thousand ancient conflicts, dwarfed by god-engines turned so alien that even the extinct necromancers would have run screaming.

Elpida doesn’t know this world, but she’s up on her feet, leading a half-dozen other fresh revenants, ripped from the oblivion of eternity and disgorged shivering and naked on cold metal slabs in a womb-lab of blinking lights and blaring alarms, by machines running some ancient plan to spit them out into a world long dead.