Every time he shut off a city’s supply of food and water and doomed its citizens to starvation, Lucas Seraph thought he was doing the right thing. In the Indus Hegemony of 2118 AD few resources remain, and only the iron rule of the Hegemony’s sadistic leader Ju-Long Ng stands in the way of society’s collapse. But Lucas chafes at Ng’s cruelty and his wife’s devotion to the Hegemony, and when he clashes with Ginevra, the scarred but beautiful leader of a shadowy resistance against the Hegemony, his faith in Ng’s vision for humanity’s survival is shattered.

Ordered to eliminate the rebels, Lucas instead discovers Ng’s true goal: the forced modification of every Hegemony citizen’s body to adapt to the wasted planet, and the murder of all those who cannot survive the procedure. Horrified, he joins Ginevra in a desperate search for a poor girl from the slums named Shakti who escaped Ng’s experiments and holds the key to toppling the Hegemony somewhere in her damaged mind.

Yet Shakti has been hunting Lucas as well, and may be the avatar of a Hindu god who’s chosen him to aid her own inscrutable plan for humanity’s evolution. Caught between conflicting loyalties and despair at the suffering he’s helped cause, Lucas must choose who and what to believe in the race to stop Ng’s plan before starvation and thirst claim two billion lives.