“On an island literally full of people severed from their roots, Deh was the only one who had no roots left at all. She was scorched earth all the way through from her skin to her core.”

When Azadeh Malik arrives at the USIC internment camp on the planet Voltaire, nobody is giving good odds on her surviving. Stateless and traumatised, haunted by twelve thousand ghosts, Deh stands at the very bottom of the camp’s rigid and unforgiving hierarchies. But she has resources her fellow internees don’t even begin to suspect, and one potential ally in harbourmaster Tiruji Ekdoulayo. When Deh makes an astonishing discovery on the mountain slopes above the camp she reaches out to Ekdoulayo for help—and triggers a chain of events that will tear through USIC like a hurricane.

“You can’t outrun yourself, and you can’t build barricades against what’s inside you…”