Showing results by author "Paola Mendoza" in All Categories

We meet 16-year-old Vali on the eve of a raid of her small Vermont town that sends her, her mother, and her younger brother on the run from the Deportation Forces. In this near-future America, all citizens are chipped at birth and this chip is used to track their movements from bus stops to schools to grocery stores. Vali and her mother are undocumented, but at least Vali has a counterfeit chip—until it starts malfunctioning. Now on the run, Vali and her family are desperately trying to make it to California, a sanctuary state that is being walled off from the rest of the country.

The year is 2033, and in this near-future America where undocumented people are forced into labor camps, life is bleak. Especially so for seventeen-year-old Rania, a Lebanese teenager from Chicago. When she and her mother were rounded up by the Deportation Force, they were given the brutal job of digging in the labor camp’s mine searching for the destructive and toxic, but potentially world-changing chemical, aqualinium.