Nayla has a rare Talent: biokinesis, the ability to manipulate life at the cellular level. Healing people is her calling, and she's never been happier than she is working with Doc, her mentor and the pirates' chief physician.

But now a call for aid has come from the most unlikely source: the home planet of the Talented called Killers, those who take life with a thought. Nayla's gift is the only chance to save a young man's life, so reluctantly, Doc agrees that she must go.

To serve her patient, Nayla will travel to the most dangerous place in the pirate colonies. She will face assassins, and challenge her Talent in ways she never expected. But most dangerous of all, she will confront her own past.

Because once, she used her Talent to take life instead of save it.