A young woman is kept in a cage underground with thirty-nine other females, guarded by armed men who never speak; her crimes unremembered... if indeed there were crimes. The youngest of forty--a child with no name and no past--she survives for some purpose long forgotten in a world ravaged and wasted. In this reality where intimacy is forbidden--in the unrelenting sameness of the artificial days and nights--she knows nothing of books and time, of needs and feelings. Then everything changes... and nothing changes. A young woman who has never known men--a child who knows of no history before the bars and restraints--must now reinvent herself, piece by piece, in a place she has never been... and in the face of the most challenging and terrifying of unknowns: freedom. A young woman is kept in a cage underground with thirty-nine other females, guarded by armed men who never speak; her crimes unremembered... if indeed there were crimes. The youngest of forty--a child with no name and no past--she survives for some purpose long forgotten in a world ravaged and wasted. In this reality where intimacy is forbidden--in the unrelenting sameness of the artificial days and nights--she knows nothing of books and time, of needs and feelings. Then everything changes... and nothing changes. A young woman who has never known men--a child who knows of no history before the bars and restraints--must now reinvent herself, piece by piece, in a place she has never been... and in the face of the most challenging and terrifying of unknowns: freedom.

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