"If everything falls apart, what will you hold on to?"--Front cover.

First book in the When the Rain Came trilogy (Acknowledgments, page [314]).

Prequel to: When the Sun Returned.

"If we stay here, if we keep wandering without a real plan, we won't last. Maybe The Hill is dangerous. But maybe it's not. It's the only plan we have." Seventeen-year-old Aurora knows how to survive. Life in the foster system has taught her how to stay quiet, stay smart, and stay ready. But nothing could prepare her for this: a never-ending storm that swallows cities, drowns forests, and turns the world into a flooded wasteland. And then her foster parents disappear without a trace. She's alone. Abandoned. And running out of time. All Aurora has is a waterlogged scrap of paper and a name: The Hill. With looters closing in and the floodwater rising higher each day, she's left with one impossible choice--stay and wait for the storm to take her, or risk everything on a journey through the drowned remains of the world to find a place that may or may not exist.