Union soldier John Chenneville suffered a traumatic head wound in battle. By the time he returned home, the Civil War was over, but tragedy awaited. John’s beloved sister and her family had been brutally murdered. Their killer goes by many names. He fought for the North and wore a badge in the name of the law. But the man John knows as A. J. Dodd is little more than a rabid animal, slaughtering without reason or remorse, needing to be put down. John will not be deterred. Not by the U.S. Marshal who threatens to arrest him for murder should he succeed. And not by Victoria Reavis, the telegraphist aiding him in his death-driven quest, yet hoping he’ll choose to embrace a life with her instead.

It is 1870, and Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, an elderly widower who travels through northern Texas giving live readings to audiences hungry for news of the world, is offered money to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. Johanna, raised by a band of Kiowa raiders who killed her parents and sister, has forgotten the English language and refuses to act “civilized.” But on their 400-mile journey, Captain Kidd and Johanna forge a deep bond, making it difficult for Kidd to give her up to her reluctant aunt and uncle when it’s time. But can he risk becoming --- in the eyes of the law --- a kidnapper himself?

In the coming centuries, the world's population has exploded and covered the earth with cities, animals are nearly all gone, and drought has taken over so that cloudy water is issued by the quart. It is an unwelcoming world for an orphan like Nadia Stepan, who grows up dreaming of the vacation spot called Lighthouse Island, in a place called the Pacific Northwest. She becomes obsessed with it and is determined to somehow find her way there.

In 1863, as the War Between the States creeps inevitably toward its bloody conclusion, former Kentucky slave Britt Johnson ventures west into unknown territory with his wife, Mary, and their three children, searching for a life and a future. But their dreams are abruptly shattered by a brutal Indian raid upon the Johnsons' settlement while Britt is away establishing a business.