It started with Los Angeles. Then San Francisco. Then Sacramento. They come up out of the ground. They have no eyes. They give off no heat—no thermal camera, no night-vision scope will ever show them. And they hunt by the shaking of the earth: a running man, a tank's engine, a heart beating too hard. The harder America fights back, the more it feeds them. Dr. Maren Cole, a zoologist, warned that we were drilling too deep. No one listened. Now, bent over the first dead creature anyone has recovered, she's the only person who understands what they are—and the only one who can see the single frequency that might kill them. But the weapon is also the largest lure ever built. To save the continent, someone will have to stay on the ground, and run. Relentless, grounded, terrifying.