Now it's twenty years later, and the children - all grown up - are still rebuilding the world. Horses and caravans are the only thin lines connecting tiny, scattered settlements - little sparks in the great dark night. Gasoline is gone, phones long-dead, television a memory. The only power in America is the New Church, the religion of the angry children, that blames the destruction of the old world on the dead adults.

In the settlement of Dallastown, a stranger comes riding in one day, telling a story of escape from the New Church's unstoppable Firemen. The Church is on the march, and the world might burn again - and the only hope might be a scared teenage girl, a gunslinger keeping his secrets, and a woman of few words and long knives. Welcome to the Orphan Age.