A girl named Billy is recording this story onto a chip in her head.
On an isolated island in the middle of the Atlantic, a building is destroyed in an explosion. It was the headquarters and school for a community made up of sixteen privileged teenagers and twenty-eight adult guardians. The building also held their food stores. They have lost contact with the mainland and their supply ship is weeks late.
Like Billy, every student has one of these microchips implanted in their brains. Its main purpose is to control what the teenagers can and can't talk about. One of the things they can't talk about is why they're all on the island.
It becomes clear that there is an enemy amongst them. As suspicion and desperation grow and order begins to break down, Billy and her friend Skip carry out their own investigation to uncover the identity of the saboteur. They get ever close to the truth, even as we learn the community's strange purpose . . . though it may all have come too late.