Mica Prinza, protagonist.
Mica - Monica - Angelina Prinza, is almost an anomaly. In decaying Cleveland, she's a sixteen year old girl in a city where the ratio of men to women is almost 5 to 1. She doesn't know any girls her own age. Her mother died ten years ago in the first wave of the Polorax Flu. Her grandmother died three weeks before Mica was born. If it weren't for the old women who live nearby, she'd be the only woman she knew.
When the invitation came to join the Polorax community to study her immunity to the pandemics, her father scavenges an old car, an old suitcase and all the supplies she needs from an expensive and empty gated community on the east side of Cleveland. Thus she arrives looking far richer than she is, and in this group of young women, that prestige sets up rivalries and alliances in the group and with the scientists. Only with Dr. V does Mica feel like she has a chance to be herself; both of them are from places where survival was against the odds.
Mica too is using a new name: her father is too notorious and he enrolls her as Mica Angelina. But a secret like a father whose face is known around the country as the example of violence the plagues spawned is not a secret likely to be kept. In her desire to stay in the background, she befriends the son of one of the French scientists, Nicolas, and the old maintenance man, Al. With these two, she learns the truth that Dr. V has been trying to spread without saying a word.
When the invitation came to join the Polorax community to study her immunity to the pandemics, her father scavenges an old car, an old suitcase and all the supplies she needs from an expensive and empty gated community on the east side of Cleveland. Thus she arrives looking far richer than she is, and in this group of young women, that prestige sets up rivalries and alliances in the group and with the scientists. Only with Dr. V does Mica feel like she has a chance to be herself; both of them are from places where survival was against the odds.
Mica too is using a new name: her father is too notorious and he enrolls her as Mica Angelina. But a secret like a father whose face is known around the country as the example of violence the plagues spawned is not a secret likely to be kept. In her desire to stay in the background, she befriends the son of one of the French scientists, Nicolas, and the old maintenance man, Al. With these two, she learns the truth that Dr. V has been trying to spread without saying a word.