There is a fine line between transformation and ruin.... Twenty-four-year-old Reeve Calder has spent his life on a high-tech space station, watching as terraforming gradually fails on his home planet of Lithia--a failure that has doomed the colonists stranded there to short, brutish lives. Reeve's dream has always been to rebuild Lithia. But when a mysterious explosion destroys the station, forcing Reeve to crash-land on Lithia's blood-hued soil, he soon learns that the reality of saving a dying planet is quite different from what he imagined. For Gabriel Bonhert, former captain of the space station, has set in motion a world cataclysm, using a fatal probe that will travel down the fiery pathway of a deep mantle plume. Now, to save the homeland he has never known, Reeve is caught in a race against time to reach Bonhert's base in the Rift Valley, a remote volcanic gateway to the hidden heart of Lithia. His staunchest ally may be a feral girl who alone seems enthralled by what Lithia is becoming, and whose enigmatic past holds the key to startling possibilities. As the old Lithia struggles to be reborn in a tide of toxic red flora creeping across the oxygen-starved planet, Reeve forges onward, coming into conflict with savage enclaves of colonists, a doomsday genemorphing cult, and a mysterious alien race with its own intentions for the planet--intentions that may include humanity's slavery or their terrible transformation.... From the Paperback edition.