The Devouring Sky

The plagues have not broken Egypt. They have only made it hungrier. The locusts come without warning - a living darkness that swallows the sun and strips the land to bare earth. Every green thing is devoured. The granaries that once held Egypt's wealth stand empty, and the empire that fed the world now faces the thing it has never known: famine. The story is told through the witnesses who watched the sky turn black. Merit and Shira, the record-keepers who have chronicled every judgment, now record the ruin of the harvest itself. Nefira, a woman of the mixed multitude, must find food for the children in her care when there is none to be found. Menna, an Egyptian officer, is ordered to seize what little grain remains from the very people he has been told to oppress. And Hori, a charioteer loyal to Pharaoh, begins to ask what a king is worth when his land is dying. As the locusts devour the last of Egypt's green, each of them must decide what they will do when there is nothing left to give - and what they will become when the sky finally clears. Because the plague was not the locusts. The plague was what the locusts left behind.