Kat and Jacob Angelfish live in the City of Los Angeles in the newly declared nation of New California. Kat, a twelve-year-old girl with unusual sensory abilities, struggles to connect with her peers. Jacob, her sixteen-year-old brother and best friend, has never given the wider world much thought. Like everyone else around them, they live with the vague threat of conflict with the United States, and with drought as a constant reality. Still, their daily lives are dominated by routine: they go to school, hang out with friends, and spend time with family. Until the day their father disappears and the secret police take their mother away.
Thrown into the middle of a terrifying mystery that they do not understand, Kat and Jacob befriend a street boy from the vast favela outside the city walls. He takes them to the slums, where they meet members of a resistance movement called the Emergence who are fighting the tyrannical rule of New California’s President, Malcolm Duke. Wanting only to reunite with their parents, they begin to understand that their world is not as simple as they thought. Meanwhile, Kat and Jacob are pursued relentlessly and methodically by Malcolm Duke’s secret weapon – an older, mysterious figure known only as Tracker. As this dark-souled, violent man realizes what the children know, and their growing importance to the Emergence, he closes in on them with increasing ferocity. Kat’s powers become critically important to their survival, and Jacob must confront what it means to act more like a man than a boy. As they each grow up, they gradually realize that their desire to reunite with their parents is inextricably connected with the mystery they left behind, with the political fate of their young country – and with the most ancient of Hopi legends.