It is the night of the spring equinox. The last tower is finished, and the Silencers wait at the foot of the ridge with their fuel. Inside the station on Copper Ridge, Nora Vance threads the reel marked Complete and unwraps her ears. Part 6 of 6, the final chapter. A work of fiction.

With a brass key and a map, Nora crosses a silent America on foot, following long lines of people who are all walking the same way. She is captured by the Silencers, armed survivors who have sealed their ears and plan to burn Copper Ridge at dawn on the twenty first of March. A girl named Jo sets her free. On the ridge, tens of thousands sit beneath a tower built from a hundred others, and Nora has to get past them to reach the door. Part 5 of 6. A work of fiction.

On Gannet Rock, eleven miles off the coast of Maine, four hundred survivors live by rules written on a sheet of plywood: no speakers, no humming, no singing, and anyone who begins to change will be cared for, not cast out. Ruth teaches the island to sign. Then a storm washes a working radio ashore, a boy finds it, and the island has to vote on whether its rules will hold. Part 4 of 6. A work of fiction.

Eleven seconds of television becomes millions of uploads. At 2:19 a.m. on the first of August, the emergency alert system sounds on two hundred million phones. Governments order the world to go silent, and a world that cannot broadcast finds it cannot hold together. Nora leaves her father behind and heads for the coast of Maine with Cass and her aunt Ruth, who has been deaf since birth. A town's storm siren nearly catches Nora and Cass both. Part 3 of 6. A work of fiction.

After the night on the ridge, Dev stops sleeping. He tells Nora the world finally makes sense. Eli goes back up the ridge alone. Then Dev gets into WHRL, Harlow's radio station, in the middle of the night, and at 6:03 the next morning the host of the morning show stops talking in the middle of the weather and begins to hum. Eleven hundred households are listening. The county health officer can find nothing wrong with the people who kept listening. By Sunday a live news report from Main Street ha

On the last Saturday of June, four friends who have just finished high school climb Copper Ridge above Harlow, Pennsylvania. They are looking for Site Kestrel, an Air Force station that shut down without explanation in October 1977. Behind a rusted fence is a steel door with a second stenciled line no one ever explained: Do not listen. Inside they find a room full of machines and one reel of tape still threaded in a recorder. They get the old generator running, and somebody presses play. Part 1