As the dust settles on a reconfigured America recovering from an environmental collapse, twelve-year-old eternal optimist Tristan Weekes thinks the eco-totalitarian organization WORLD is doing a great job healing the planet. He lives in Canland—an agrarian California desert-greening project absent many of today’s common technologies—where heatwaves, food shortages, and a refugee crisis divide society. Tristan, however, lives with a rare and life-defining medical condition called analgesia, which prohibits him from feeling physical pain, and leaves him stress-free in the face of every surrounding danger.

Tristan is determined to demonstrate awareness and independence to the people closest to him: his older brother, Dylan, a drug-addicted satellite hacker; his mother, Helena, a powerful population control-extremist; and his father, Michael, who has been missing for two years on a classified WORLD research assignment. They each see the world in clashing perspectives, and they all try to impose their will upon Tristan. But when a series of cataclysmic events forces Tristan to think for himself, he must face the secrets his family keeps, the truth about his own involvement in the horrors enacted by Canland and WORLD, and decide whether to save himself, his family, or the orphans of Canland.