Brandon Dauphin feels like a dying ember. He's jobless and feels worthless, and falling in love has only made his problem worse. In an authoritarian and overstimulated 22nd-century America, all he can do to relieve his pain is indulge in the computer-simulated fantasies of a network called Dynamic Reality, until a virus takes control of the simulation. Unable to return to the real world, Brandon finds that the virus shares his questions about existence, and that she will stop at nothing for her answers.

Hundreds of years after a global catastrophe known as “The Time of Forgetting” halted mankind’s technological progress, a new army has risen to conquer the scattered peoples of the Earth. Two brothers, Nitcef and Venitcen, capture a writing pad from the enemy and flee with their village to Rai Ver While, a city under the protection of Zanine, their tribe’s only Sky Person. Only Sarsa, Zanine’s granddaughter, knows what the writing pad represents. The ability to write is the ability to control the ancestors’ technology.

In the second book of This Falling Eden, Sarsa is captured in an occupied village, finding the enemy knows everything about her. Nitcef’s unique control of the armadillo men is their only chance to escape into the vast sea that divides the Earth, on a yacht they find in an abandoned platform city slowly crumbling into its waters. Pursued by armadillo men who command the skies, intelligent dolphins who command the seas, and an AI virus who commands the world’s weather control system, the travelers discover that leaving their home mountains was the easy part.

Their long journey to the City of Falling Water is over, but what they find is nothing like the rumors. Nitcef races to find his little brother without being found himself, by a fiancée whose mind now belongs to the enemy. Meanwhile, Sarsa is forced to make an impossible choice, pitting her hopes for salvation against her. Novarro, already thought to be lost at sea, is saved from death by a Redemptionist and a winged mongrel named Sivy — the very assassin who caused Verian’s sudden rise to power.