Aline and Carlos, friends since their days at the police academy, have been tasked with a particularly sensitive investigation. Tem, the youngest daughter of a wealthy family on Mars, is a disabled child and a renowned artist. But she has been diagnosed with an aggressive genetic disease, which a host of nanomachines are seeking to treat, and has lost her ability to create.

The Edo-Jendal family tells Aline and Carlos that Tem was born without the ability to communicate, and that she owes her artistic genius solely to the personality of a young artist copied onto a chip implanted in her brain. But the experimental nanomachines have proved to be wildly aggressive and have damaged the personality chip. The family wants Aline and Carlos to find the young artist, who has disappeared into the hell of Earth.

The novel, whose action takes place a few years before the events of Mars Express, plunges detectives Aline and Carlos into a probe that will lead them from the financial elite of Mars to the Earth’s underbelly, in the tradition of Blade Runner and the novels of William Gibson.