As the country recovers from the recent war, a growing resentment against non-humans threatens the livelihood of Darren and his Hellhound friends. On a weekend trip home to see his family, one good deed turns that resentment into a threat against his children's lives

New Amsterdam came to life when the first colonists washed up on the beach and called themselves a community. In the several hundred years since it had died of disease, of genocide, of sloth and self-indulgence, rebuilding after each death and recovering a new personality on the foundations of the old. Now on the cusp of another death and rebirth, it has become an ailing city of cabals and conspiracies, tempers fraying and teeth on edge, and a handful of ordinary people drowning in their own lives who never expected to be on the front lines of this war.