Summary

Book 2 opens with a narrative shift, zooming out and giving a birds-eye view of the American Southwest, showing its deterioration, describing governmental efforts to control, explore, and circumnavigate the dune sea. The towns, mines, laboratories, communities, societies, tennis courts, crops, lakes, etc. buried beneath the sand are listed. The sand keeps coming in sheets, despite the work of climatologists, geologists, volcanologists, and conservationists. The Amargosa is described as an anthropomorphic being on an unrelenting march: angry, cruel, uncaring and yet strangely alluring. Rumors of a colony in the Amargosa circulate. People express how the dune sea calls to them with a curious energy, that it beckons them. A stockbroker writes a post on his blog that he could see the Amargosa from an airplane, and the automatic feeling of love he felt.

Luz wakes up in the mysterious colony, in a blue van...