Nightshade is a Hybrid: a human being who has spent his entire life being taken apart and studied by engineers, anatomists, alchemists and madmen. His heart was long ago cut away to be replaced with clockwork, and his limbs with advanced mechanical prosthetics. He's used to being passed around like cheap currency. In the eyes of the public he is a machine to be put to use, not a person with feelings or ambitions of his own.

He's fine with this. He doesn't, after all, have any feelings or ambitions worth mentioning, so the public is hardly at fault. He willingly drinks any poison they give him and enacts any deed too grim for them to dirty their hands with. He has no regrets and never looks to the future.

. . . That is, until he encounters Artemis Southerland, a man who singlehandedly turns his stoic life inside out, who seems determined to teach him that his own value is much greater than he's ever supposed. Before he knows it, Nightshade finds himself presented with a choice – to be good and accept that he's only fit for obeying orders, or to step forward and fight for Artemis and all of the values he's never believed in before.