This Mortal Coil

**New from the bestselling author of The Pieces of the Puzzle, The Kingdoms & the Elves of the Reaches, and In the Service of Dragons!** ** **

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Our World Is No Longer Ours... It's Theirs.

The human survivors lead a hardscrabble life, scavenging what they can from the dead city, waiting and watching. Cedes isn't like Matthew and his regulars. She dreams. She talks. She questions. She wonders why Luke disappeared, where Luke disappeared to. She wants to know what we are to the machines. This is her story. This is our story. This is the story of us, the humans who survive.

In the ruins of our world, a new order arose, an order controlled by the very machines humankind created. The end for us came not from a massive global war but from something unthinkable, incomprehensible. The machines simply replaced us and we let them, and so, in the end, humanity went out not with a bang, but with a whimper. No shots fired. No bombs dropped. No cities destroyed. We ended and the machines began--or at least that is what the few human survivors of the machine apocalypse believe.