The Earth is struggling to rebuild itself from the excesses of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Brad, a Doctor of General Applied Technologies colloquially known as a Tinker, travels the Dark Lands--areas without electricity--helping the people bootstrap themselves back from the edge of civilization. All until he finds the plague in the town of Guelph. Now Brad and his assistant Carla struggle to save the lives of the rapidly succumbing townspeople, while a cold war battle between Novo Gaia and the United Grid Regions plays out over the quarantine and the lives of the people in the Dark Lands. The political theater is leaving Brad with a mounting toll of dead victims. Will Brad and Carla be able to stop the plague, or will the contagion escape, infecting a world that is in no condition to survive another catastrophe?