This is how the world ends the first time ...
During World War II, the United States locked up more than a hundred thousand Japanese Americans in internment camps. Now Manzanar’s gates are opening again and its mysteriously reconstructed barracks are about to be filled once more.
In a world when aliens have been and gone, mankind is coming to terms with the fact that they’re not alone in the universe … and that their unwelcome visitors left behind a deadly parting gift.
Soon, Americans are growing incrementally taller, their world shrinking around them. The nation’s little people are exempt from this mysterious affliction known as the Stretching. They remain the same, while their loved ones and friends begin to rapidly outgrow the civilization man built.
Marion Thomas Nelson, school teacher, husband, father to two children—one average-sized, one not—is one of the exempt. His wife and his son are already a good six inches taller when an Executive Order banishing the nation’s little people to those old World War II internment camps tears his family apart.
Imprisoned in Manzanar with his tiny daughter, the world outside the gates crumbling, Marion is expected to work for his keep and devote his body to science.
But Marion isn’t staying.