Time's Dark Laughter

Book 2 finds Joshua and his friends alive, but not well, three years after the calamitous rescue in Book 1. Beauty's wife, Rose, disappears again, this time drawn compulsively to others of her kind — those with connecting ports implanted in their brains by the Queen's minions. But now Joshua goes missing as well, ensnared by the Queen herself, to father a semi-human child with the telekinetic potential of destroying the entire planet. It's up to beautiful android Jasmine, powerful centaur Beauty, and Joshua's own disturbing, ghostly doppelganger to save the lives of those they love, even as they pull the crumbling world from the brink of destruction.