The City Beneath the Earth

Constructed like a wheel, an underground city is built near Phoenix, Arizona, with the intent to house generations of people in a post-apocalyptic world, a world turned upside-down by the Mars Virus. After only 20 years, the city's denizens encounter an illness that promises to decimate them all.

Eighteen year-old Jessica Galloway takes it upon herself to be the first of her people to voluntarily leave the cool and comfortable clime of her city-to suffer in the blistering heat of the surface world, so that she might find a cure for the disease that has beset herself and her people.

Jessica must also lead her superstitious citizens on a quest for independence from Topside, even though resources everywhere will soon be gone. Her people must overcome fire, flood, wind, total darkness, and earthquakes, while she must deal with the consequences of falling in love with a Topside man. Suddenly, she finds herself having to make the hardest choice of her life―to leave her besieged people, or to leave the man she loves.