Kogane Bay is a city that lapses to whoever shows up. The Carmine corporation owns the water, the power and the clinics, and when it kills you it buys your voice off your family — every recording you ever left — because a voice can testify. The dead are called the Kept. Nobody says no.

Sundog Vega carries three things: her father's bike, his jacket, and a book full of faces she has drawn wrong off other people's stories. Idris Vega was a mechanic. Carmine's file calls him a survey correction. A correction has no names.

She damages a stranger's car by accident and it costs her a duel she cannot win — which is how she meets Zamir, who mapped the road Carmine used to find her father and quit when he understood why; Lyra, who can turn anyone into anybody and has been nobody for eleven years; and Echo. They have one night. Two charter keys sit in Carmine's custody, lapsed forty years; put them back in the chain before midnight and the city stays its own.

At the party where it ends, the woman who keeps the vault makes Sundog an offer: at midnight her father is wiped with the rest of them, and she can keep him. Come inside, and he's yours.

Sundog says no. Then, in the state's own interrogation room, on the state's own camera, she reads his name into the record.