When The Children of Amargosa ends, kilometer-wide saucers are moving across the sky, a la V. Only aliens are not going to step off and tell the Amargosans that friends have arrived. Nor is Morena Baccarin going to sweet talk them with motherly talk. But they are going to make life hard on the humans.
The humans have been driven underground or into the mountains. The Gelt, it seems, don’t like to fight in the mountains. It won’t be explained until Storming Amargosa. But it’s the one advantage the humans have.
In the beginning, JT Austin and Eric Yuwono have to balance the end of their teen years – JT is sixteen and a legal adult under Martian law, Yuwono is fifteen – with having to train civilians twice or even three times their ages in soldiering. Davra Andraste is valued for her brain, as is the pyrotechnically obsessed Connor Duffy and his friend Ellie Nardino. Diana Jovann, the cool, aloof leader of the Cadet Corps when Children begins, is virtually the leader of the resistance for all of Amargosa. The legitimate resistance, that is.
Yet Lucius Kray, the would-be warlord, is on the loose, still recruiting and still promising liberation under his guidance. Most of his early followers have abandoned him, yet he remains an even bigger enemy than the Gelt.
And what of the Gelt? The end of The Magic Root and the beginning of Tishla saw Laral Jorl, the mastermind behind the scheme to pilfer human colonies, dead when forced to confront his own son in a duel before the Realm’s Sovereign. This leaves Hanar, formerly the Compact colony of Gilead, under TIshla’s leadership, but Amargosa now in the hands of Laral’s son Umish. And Umish is not happy the humans have had time to form a resistance.
All this comes to a head at the beginning of Broken Skies. Second Wave begins with JT and Davra witnessing that doomed space battle from the ground. They see what they soon learn is the starship Ban Ki-moon, a capital ship of the Compact Navy, falling from the sky. When they learn that the Moon has survived, it sets off a mad scramble to retrieve the ship before the Gelt go after it. JT, Davra, and Eric defy orders and even their mentor, the mysterious Suicide, to go after the ship. For Yuwono, it’s a chance to prove himself officer material. For Davra, it means being something other than a coddled brain trapped in the resistance’s underground lair. For JT Austin, it means he can keep a promise he made to Lizzy, the woman who gave her life to save his.