When Shersti is taken to the prison-world of the Foundry, she thinks her life is over. However, her trials are just beginning. Overcoming torture and hardship, Shersti escapes the Foundry and becomes one of the most successful vigilantes working to overthrow her tyrannical government. But what was to be a routine sabotage mission turns into so much more when Shersti falls ill to the parasitic disease Revere.

Ten years previous, on the world of Zutrara, Vaiden is captured by the Shalaki as a child, and he is threatened with death or working against his own people. Doing all he can to survive, Vaiden lives through a war that destroys his people and leaves him alone—welcome nowhere. Yet when Shersti contacts him, a decade later, to guide her group of vigilantes to an underground shelter on his now enslaved homeworld, he agrees. It is a decision that changes his entire life.