Steven Mills

BURNING STONES:  a science fiction novel by Steven Mills.  In a world already desolated by an avian influenza, paramedic Alex Gauthier's 21-year-old daughter, Gemma, afflicted by the so-called Lucy virus, is devolving--turning into a proto human--while forest fires besiege the valley where they live.  When Gemma asks Alex to kill her--perform a mercy killing--when she is no longer human, he finds himself making a promise he doesn't want to keep.  At the other end of the valley, Veronica "Ronnie" Sapriken, the only remaining RCMP officer, is struggling to keep the peace in a disintegrating town while the rest of the world is falling apart, only to discover that someone has been trafficking in devolving kids.  Locked away in a FEMA camp outside Spokane, Sage Van Peldt, whose husband and children were among the first to be infected with the strange virus, plans escape back to the valley of her childhood, not knowing whether she will survive the trip, or what she will find once she gets there.    BURNING STONES is the harrowing story of devolution, and of making choices no one wants to make.

"By now you must have guessed:  I come from another planet.  But I will never say to you, Take me to your leaders....Instead I will say, take me to your trees.  Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns.  Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths.  These are worth it.  These are what I have come for."  from "Homelanding" by Margaret Atwood.