I was sure of nothing else except that the return of the harvest ships, minus passengers, minus the vampire Entourage that was supposed to keep them safe, could only be bad news. My own brother, Sven is the leader of the Entourage, and now the leader of the rebellion, which conflicts me and my mother in ways that we hadn't anticipated. The rebellion seems to be a catalyst more than an event, and truths will be revealed about the human and vampire condition that will take the entire post-apocalyptic inhabitants of the earth by surprise. Realizing that things really aren't as they appear, I must put my own curiosity aside and allow things to unfold and reveal "naturally." But this doesn't make the process any less frustrating. The end though, could never be anticipated, not by me, or any of the others, this perhaps because the end may turn out to be the end of our civilization... Nature has a very clever way of leveling the playing field. And looking at the earth of 2221, the playing field was definitely leveled. The image before me reminds me of the opening paragraphs of a book I'd read in the early days of the Dark Ages, a book they had called the bible. It described exactly what I was now looking at, the watery depths, a land formless and waste, except maybe for the steel stilts protruding out of the dark waters that became level platforms out of which grew slivers of glass and steel that housed what was left of the human race.