After the events of book 4, The Fall, with Francesca’s now infamous flight from government service, Cain returns with her to the orbital archipelago and to his former life in the commerce in violence. As Francesca struggles to make peace with the consequences of her choices—and with her new reality as a gun-for-hire—Cain, too, finds himself struggling with reentry issues, as the scores that he had once pulled down no longer satisfy him.

Unwilling to accept the role of expendable, Cain soon demands greater control over how he and Francesca pursue the goals of their corporate, governmental, and criminal employers—and immediately find themselves squaring off against the heaviest marks, from raiding a secret Korean cybernetics laboratory to executing a hit on Gate Station Mars.

As a possible new future together takes shape, however, the past proves restless, as an old adversary of Francesca’s appears with a multilayered scheme to undo all that she had built in her former life. Cain and Francesca—along with their handpicked mercenary crew—must then swap scores with the archipelago’s most brazen crime lord, to eradicate the despicable, to preserve the indispensable.