Katherine Holt lives in a state of desperate poverty in the Lower Quarter of Incorporated Municipality Number 27, FEMA Region II, foraging for food with her disabled sister, Rebecca, and hiding with her Mother from the teams of Sweepers who roam the Lower Quarter, which is supposed to have been evacuated due to plague. But Katherine and her sister hide a secret-one that REGA, the controlling, authoritarian governmental bureaucracy in her sector, would do anything to get their hands on: she and her sister are immune to the virus. When they are picked up by a Sweeper team and taken to the HUT - a prison-like processing center for the indigent, events begin to spiral rapidly out of control as REGA becomes aware of their secret, and Katherine engineers her own escape. Can Katherine rescue her sister from the clutches of REGA before they use Rebecca for their own ends, or is she falling into a clever trap laid specifically for her? And what dark secret has her adopted Mother been hiding for the past twenty years?