In the year 2031, Russian moguls have overtaken the United States, invited in by a traitorous president years earlier, and have disbanded the Constitution, making the nation (what's left of it after global warming and atomic blasting) into their private feudal playground. After racially segregating the population, the white people remaining are processed into castes, determined by a test at the age of sixteen, when teenagers are called Emergents.

Sixteen year old Heartley Jane is just old enough to remember life before the moguls, a world in which her group of friends is not ripped apart and segregated by race into Resettlement Zones. Her heart and soul are haunted with the ache to put things back to how they were. Little does she know that such a revolution is brewing and that she is the key that will set the wheels into motion, even though it means she will die. That prediction is set in stone. However, she does have a choice: she can refuse and save her own life, allowing the status quo to continue and the friends she loves doomed to lives of imprisonment and servitude. She is too young to have to make the ultimate choice, but the fate of her world and everyone in it rests at her hands...