In the near future, an art-school dropout, an AIDS baby, a tech-activist, and a blogger live in a world where an online identity is at least as important as a physical one and getting disconnected is a punishment worse than imprisonment.

"In the aftermath of a deadly outbreak bearing similarities to the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic, a city at the tip of Africa is losing its mind-complete with hallucinations, paranoia, and good old-fashioned ghost sightings. Is it the result of secret government experiments, an episode of mass hysteria, the effects of trauma, a sign of the end times? In a quarantined city in which the inexplicable has already occurred, rumors, superstitions, and conspiracy...

Anglet Sutonga, a former Steeplejack, must pose as a foreign princess to catch the thief who stole the government's plans for a secret weapon. Yet Ang has other things on her mind as well. Refugees from the north are trickling into the city, but an ambitious politician is proposing extreme measures to get rid of them, and when Ang discovers that one theft could spark a conflagration of conspiracy that will threaten the most vulnerable of Bar-Selehm,...