The World Awakens (Hilo Dome)

Two hundred years after nuclear war wiped out civilization, a crew of mute Hawaiian sailors builds traditional Polynesian voyaging canoes and crosses the Pacific to find out who else survived — and what they've become.

HILO DOME BOOK III

Two centuries after the missiles fell, the ocean is the only road left.

Nathan and Kayli Ohana can't speak — a genetic mutation stole that from their ancestors along with everything else the Great War didn't burn. But they can build. On the shores of a deserted Maui town, using hand-drawn plans from a lost voyaging society and koa logs hauled down a volcanic mountainside, they construct two massive double-hulled sailing canoes and recruit a crew willing to cross thousands of miles of open Pacific with nothing but the stars to guide them.

Their mission is simple and enormous: find out if anyone else is still alive. Tahiti, Fiji, Tonga, New Zealand — each landfall brings first contact with survivors who've rebuilt their own worlds in isolation, some welcoming, some hostile, and none quite what the crew expected. A Tongan warlord is massing war canoes in a hidden channel. Pirates from Bora Bora are stealing catches at spearpoint. And on a tiny atoll, a man named Enoha offers black pearls and oysters to strangers he can barely understand.

Meanwhile, back home, old grudges threaten to fracture the fragile community the crew left behind.

This is a story about what happens after the end — not the scavenging and the ruin, but the moment someone looks at the horizon and decides to sail toward it. With a crew held together by loyalty, stubbornness, and a twelve-year-old girl who refuses to be left on shore.

Perfect for fans of Station Eleven, The Dog Stars, and anyone who's ever wondered what the Polynesian wayfinders could teach a broken world.