In an alternate near-future, Join allows for the fusing of several minds into a single consciousness with multiple bodies. But best friends Lucky and Leap encounter a terrifying malfunction in the Join technology and discover that the light of this miracle technology may be blinding them to its horrors. As they move into the heart of the new North America, devastated by environmental ruin, they meet the architects of a new kind of human consciousness, and their trust in each other becomes their only guide through the moral hazards of a society in which individual identity has come undone, and a sadistic killer with dozens of identities follows them in relentless pursuit.