A man drives across a hot and brutal landscape. His rig is powered by sunlight, he has a water maker and growing pods – the tools of survival – and with him travels a silent girl. He’s looking for somewhere they can be safe, and when he discovers what looks like an abandoned mine he stops. But the mine already has an inhabitant, who points his crossbow at the child and asks, ‘Is she even real?’ In the hope that it might prolong their survival, our man starts talking: about the place he grew up – a decimated landscape hundreds of years in the future, so hot in summer that he and his mother must live below ground – and about his recruitment to ‘The Service’, a top secret organization whose objective is to educate its operators as to the truth behind the state of the world and then train them to kill their targets – desce