Is it betraying the dead to forgive their killers?

Kerrig, a.k.a. Earther 27, is an angry, middle-aged man who has lived his whole life under foreign rule. He knows that one day the People will rise up against the Outsiders, and on that day he will stand with them. Until then, he works at his job in the mines, and holds himself apart from the Outsiders.

But then his life is uprooted and he finds himself on the run with Outsiders and worse. One by one his old certainties are destroyed, and he begins to question everything he thought he knew. Kerrig must make his peace with the past before he can change the future; but it's not so easy to forgive and forget when you're on the losing side.