Rachael Sparks was born in Waco, Texas, and grew up with a family who nurtured her endless curiosity while overlooking that most roadtrips involved her nose in a book.

She graduated with a degree in Microbiology from Texas A&M University and her first college job was ghost writing a nonfiction science book. Her side job as a sous chef also led to two incomplete minors in English and Organic Chem and a lifelong love of cooking. After a decade-long career in Austin, Texas, as a transplant specialist, she joined a startup fighting healthcare acquired infections. She has nurtured a lifelong interest in infectious diseases and the science of human health, while privately writing reality-based science fiction novels in her head.

After relocating with her husband, young daughter, and mother to Asheville, North Carolina, she finally put her first novel onto the page. In her free time she serves on the board of the Asheville Museum of Science and loves to cook, brew, garden, and spend time with friends and family in between obsessively researching new science concepts, history, or new recipes.

When antibiotics ceased to work, Rory Stevigson lost her mother to an infection, the same type that has killed a seventh of the world’s population. Then stoic and scarred Navy, a young military veteran, enters the quiet life she leads with her father on their farm, and Rory finds herself pulled towards to him despite his mysterious past…until he exposes the secrets her mother and father kept from Rory, including that her own blood may hold the cure the world needs, and she is the target of groups working to find it.

The government’s research arm, TEAR, wants to sell the cure to only those who can afford it. The Resistance would give the cure away to all, and they’ve sent Navy to find her before TEAR can. Fleeing the dangerous government who would use her to gain power and struggling to survive a world turned upside down, Rory, her father, and their new protector narrowly avoid capture and death to keep her hidden. Can she find the new path of human evolution before TEAR finds her?