During a test one day on the compound of Socius, seventeen-year-old Kaya encounters the words Anima Mortem, which she is asked to translate: animated death. After that she meets Luka Wintle, a boy with eyes that bring back her past, a boy whose sister is dying of a disease Kaya thought had been eradicated in anybody under fifty. A boy who knows about Anima Mortem. And a boy who, like her, wants to take the tyrannical Lukas Wintle, his adopted father, down.
Meanwhile outside of the compound, Micah is captured by a group of Raiders and put to work in the labs below the compound to earn her keep because she is not a viable test subject. It's outside the compound as she's finally been promoted to Raider that she encounters William whose parents and younger brother have just been shot by her co-Raiders. Because she doesn't want him to be killed like his family, she carefully tests his blood only to find that it is intertwined with Wolf DNA and so, not wanting him to be tested on, she does the unthinkable; she takes a sample of her own blood instead. But at what cost? Could his blood be the cure that Lukas Wintle and the rest of the world has been waiting for?
