At seventeen, Alexander "Sikunder" Armstrong fled the tedium of a well-planned life in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley to the frigid dystopian wastes of the Serberor Campus on the colony of Samsāra, some 20 light-years from Earth. As a jawan in the United Nations Off-World Legion, Sikunder experiences the dumping ground of the refugee camps, where tribes and warlords rule with an iron fist, and life is cheap and easily lost.