It's Christmas Eve and Marion Thomas Nelson's year is improving. The United States won an impromptu skirmish with an unexpected foe, and now he and his wife are on their way to pick up their kids from Grandma's house, where they've been safely stashed away. The future looks bright. But their celebration is cut short when the country is struck by a peculiar plague with extraterrestrial origins-a plague that is causing Americans to grow. Marion and his daughter are among the few unaffected. His wife and son are not. When people start outgrowing the world they built, an increasingly paranoid government banishes Marion and those like him to the country's old World War II-era internment camps. Imprisoned in a mysteriously rebuilt Manzanar, and surrounded by a hostile landscape in a dying world, Marion, his tiny daughter, and the other prisoners are expected to work for their keep and donate their bodies to science while the outside world hunts for a cure. Now forcibly separated from his family, Marion must plot a way home. But doing so will trigger a chain of horrifying discoveries and dark twists as he risks everything to get back to them.