Toby's mother dies from a mysterious illness linked to the HelthWyzer supplements she sold as a franchise operator.

Toby's father shoots himself; Toby buries his body under the patio and walks away from their home forever.

Blanco, the SecretBurger manager, selects Toby as his next victim and begins sexually abusing her during her lunch breaks.

Adam One leads the Gardeners in a street protest outside SecretBurger, and Toby escapes with them to their rooftop garden.

Lucerne brings young Ren to live at the Edencliff Rooftop Garden after leaving her husband to be with Zeb.

Ren meets Amanda at the Sinkhole mall and persuades Adam One to let Amanda come and live with the Gardeners.

Pilar, diagnosed with terminal cancer, takes the Death Angel mushroom and dies peacefully with Toby sitting beside her.

Blanco leads an attack on the Edencliff Rooftop Garden, and Toby repels him by knocking over all three beehives.

The Gardeners surgically alter Toby's appearance and install her as manager of the AnooYoo Spa to keep her hidden from Blanco.

The Waterless Flood pandemic begins; Ren is sealed inside the Sticky Zone quarantine room at the Scales and Tails club.

Toby survives the pandemic alone inside the AnooYoo Spa, rationing stored food and defending the garden from attacking pigs.

Amanda reaches the locked Sticky Zone, guesses the reversed door code, and frees the trapped Ren.

Two Painballers ambush the group in Heritage Park, kill Oates, and abduct both Ren and Amanda.

Ren escapes her captors and reaches Toby at AnooYoo Spa, where Toby nurses her fever, wounds, and rope burns.

Toby, Ren, and Jimmy overpower the two Painballers and free Amanda, before a group of Crakers emerges from the darkness.

Toby's life is shattered when her mother dies from a HelthWyzer illness and her father takes his own life, leaving her vulnerable to exploitation at SecretBurger under the sadistic Blanco. The God's Gardeners rescue Toby and give her a new community, just as young Ren is brought into the group and forms the friendship with Amanda that will define both their lives. After Pilar's death reshapes Toby's sense of purpose, Blanco's attack on the Edencliff rooftop forces the Gardeners to scatter and places Toby in hiding at the AnooYoo Spa. When the Waterless Flood pandemic strikes, Toby survives alone in the spa while Ren is sealed in a quarantine room at Scales and Tails, each unaware the other is alive. The two women are eventually reunited, and together they fight to rescue the abducted Amanda, a reunion that ends with the arrival of a genetically engineered new human species.

The headline events of survival, community, and catastrophe.

Toby is accidentally sterilized when an infected needle is used during an egg extraction procedure she undergoes for money.

Toby joins the Gardeners and earns their trust through hard work, eventually teaching holistic healing classes to the children.

Pilar invites Toby to learn beekeeping and mushroom cultivation, giving her a sense of peace and purpose for the first time.

Lucerne begins an affair with Zeb after encountering him at the AnooYoo Spa-in-the-Park, where he works as a gardener.

Ren inadvertently tells Bernice that her father Burt has been meeting Nuala in the Vinegar Room, fracturing their friendship.

CorpSeCorps arrests Burt for secretly running a high-potency genetic marijuana splice grow-op inside the Buenavista Condo building.

Lucerne invents a false abduction story to explain herself and Ren to the HelthWyzer Compound security guards.

Ren and Jimmy become intimate for the first time after his mother escapes the Compound and takes his beloved pet rakunk.

Ren catches Jimmy kissing another girl at the mall and ends their relationship.

Ren is forced to drop out of Martha Graham Academy when Lucerne cuts off all financial support and moves to a new Compound.

Shackie, Croze, and Oates escape from the Painball Arena and find Ren and Amanda sheltering at Scales and Tails.

The Gold Team Painballers invade Scales and Tails in the night, forcing the five survivors to flee through the back door.

The group discovers Oates hanging from a tree with his throat cut and his kidneys harvested.

Toby and Ren meet Croze, Rebecca, and the surviving MaddAddam members who have taken shelter in a cobb house near Heritage Park.

Toby volunteers to accompany the armed Ren away from the MaddAddam group to search for Amanda along the shore.

Toby's time before the Gardeners is marked by exploitation and loss, from accidental sterilization to the violence of SecretBurger, but the community she finds there gradually heals her through work, friendship with Pilar, and the routines of the rooftop garden. Ren's path through the Gardeners is shaped by her complicated bond with Bernice, a friendship she damages when she reveals a secret that sets off a chain of consequences including Burt's arrest. After Lucerne returns with Ren to the HelthWyzer Compound under a false story, Ren's heart is broken first by Jimmy's inability to commit and then by financial abandonment that forces her to drop out of college. When the pandemic strikes, unexpected allies in the form of escaped MaddAddam members Shackie, Croze, and Oates reunite with Ren and Amanda, but a violent attack by the Gold Team forces the survivors to scatter. Toby and Ren eventually find the MaddAddam community and must choose to leave them behind in their desperate bid to recover Amanda.

The formative experiences and survival struggles behind the main story.

Toby's father teaches her to shoot at age twelve and secretly shows her where he buried his illegal rifle.

After spending her savings on a drug binge following her sterilization, Toby chooses survival and takes a job at SecretBurger.

Pilar tells Toby that HelthWyzer almost certainly used her mother as a test subject by infecting her own supplements.

A teenage Glenn visits the Gardeners' Tree of Life Exchange, secretly carrying Pilar's cancer biopsy samples hidden inside a honey jar.

Toby accepts the position of Eve Six after Pilar's death and goes to the beehives to tell the bees their keeper is gone.

After a violent fight with Zeb, Lucerne cuts off her hair and takes Ren away from the Gardeners to return to the HelthWyzer Compound.

Zeb reports to Adam One that Glenn has gone dark — the Gardeners have lost contact with their insider in the Compounds.

Glenn's mother defects from HelthWyzer with stolen genetic data and arrives at the Gardeners seeking asylum and passage out.

Zeb visits Toby at AnooYoo Spa and reveals he now leads MaddAddam, and that Glenn is the man who engineered the deadly virus.

Ren unexpectedly encounters her mother Lucerne at the AnooYoo Spa; Lucerne looks straight through her, and Ren resolves to leave.

Glenn visits Scales and Tails with a woman he calls Oryx, introducing himself as Crake — names Ren recognizes as extinct animals.

Toby walks to her parents' old neighborhood during the early pandemic chaos and digs up her father's buried rifle.

A Painballer slits Mordis's throat after he refuses to reveal the Sticky Zone door code, leaving Ren sealed inside with no rescuer.

Toby discovers the gravely injured Blanco hiding at the gatehouse and poisons him with Death Angel mushroom powder dissolved in water.

Toby and Ren encounter a group of Crakers near the shore who confirm two men and a woman recently passed through.

Small acts of preparation and hard-won knowledge define Toby's survival instinct long before the pandemic — from her father hiding a rifle to Pilar exposing the corporate conspiracy that destroyed Toby's family. The Gardeners' secret network is gradually revealed through Glenn's early role as a courier and informant, and then through Zeb's alarming news that this insider has gone silent and that his own mother has defected with stolen data. Toby is eventually told the full truth at the AnooYoo Spa: the group called MaddAddam exists, and the man behind the lethal virus is Glenn, now calling himself Crake. Ren's own turning points are quieter — a chance encounter with her indifferent mother pushes her into Scales and Tails, where she watches Glenn transform into Crake before her eyes. When the pandemic arrives, a series of violent revelations strips away every safety net, until Toby's final act of poisoning Blanco and the appearance of the Crakers signal that the old world is truly gone.