Super-powered grandmothers, elemental Marines, and extraordinary teens: enter a world where every midlife crisis might become a national emergency.

Ever since one disastrous night during World War 2, a third of the world's population has carried the potential to "roll into power." No one can predict which few will actually go through the change, and there's only one, tragic certainty: rolling before the age of forty is a death sentence.

Passing into middle age might be uneventful, marked only by extra candles on your birthday cake, but it might lead to becoming a human fireball, drowning a city, or teleporting into outer space.

Rough Passages presents the stories of five people forever changed and connected by the powers that disrupt their lives:

• 1. A single mother with two jobs whose new talent changes her life beyond her wildest dreams.
• 2. A Marine captain tasked with investigating the all-too-human crimes a squad of super-powered soldiers can commit.
• 3. A lonely woman whose desperate homesickness is matched in strength only by her ability to wreak seismic havoc.
• 4. A grandmother, torn from home and family, abused and imprisoned, who must choose between revenge and forgiveness.
• 5. A teenager afraid to take the R-factor test that will define her future, who learns there are worse things to fear than a positive result.