17-year-old Miles Westin lives a normal life in Hyde's Park, Rhode Island. He's smart, but he always lives in the shadow of his older brother Chuck. At least he has his best friend Allison Dreary with him. Everything changes, however, when a shift in the Earth's magnetic field is discovered leading to an unprecedented amount of natural disasters that will end life as we know it in about one year. All seems lost until Allison hits a man with her car. The man slips into a coma but not before implying there is a way to reverse the shift. With everything going against him, Miles is stuck with a problem he really doesn't want to fix.