In 1883, deranged by grief after the death of his family, Henry Cavendish set out alone on a sailboat from San Francisco Bay, seeking only a solitary oblivion. Instead, he discovered an unmapped coastal island that he christened Asphodel, a windswept land inhabited only by a secretive brotherhood of ascetic monks dwelling within a walled fortress.
More than twenty years later, the island is host to a small city, a colony of would-be Californians, complete with a new generation of island-born children who patrol their districts in packs and generate hotly contested games in the island’s wild woodland park. Among them rises a trouser-wearing, slingshot-toting urchin queen, one Everett Brennan, known to all as Red.
When an inexplicable devastation lays waste to Asphodel City, leaving an island of half-feral orphans in its wake, Red begins to pull at a mysterious thread linking her to Henry Cavendish, and further, to the unseen brotherhood, the ones they call the Veluthans. When Red and her ragged crew breach the Veluthan wall, she will risk all that remains to her to protect what she finds there, even as its secrets spill over the city, leaving nothing unchanged.