Lightbar, a vicious corporation run by a mechanically modified, capitalist maniac has worked China’s citizens to death. Robert Lilly, a young savant soldier with the genetic ability to talk with machines, joins the Citizen's Army to start a revolution. When he arrives, the plan immediately goes awry as Lightbar levels Xi'an, a prominent city of 20 million, with a kinetic energy bomb the size of which the world has never seen. Robert, his squad of misfits, and an unlikely cyborg ally with no memory of their past, must race against the clock to counterattack before Lightbar’s army regroups. Their journey takes them from the polluted city of Lanzhou eastward to the super-megacity of the Jing-Jin-Ji. Through his travels, Robert forms strong bonds with his squad, and even finds love, but can they take down Lightbar before the bombs destroy all of China?

In the 2267 C.E., a century after the nukes of WWIII vaporized cities and irradiated the landscape, greedy CORPs control the new America with consumerism, drugs and cybernetic modifications. But not everyone embraces this technology. Genetically-modified savants hold on to their lineage like armor, using their Skills to subvert the CORPs—and are murdered for it. Sam Lilly, a street kid from the slums of The Sink, loses Grant, his best friend, as well as his leg in a dataheist-gone-wrong. Rescued by a savant named Mara, he falls in with The Company, a group of anti-corporation rebels, each with their own tragedy at the hands of the CORPs. While Sam learns to live with his new body, the computer chip he carries whispers revolution and makes him the target of a single-minded CORPs assassin. Can Sam work with The Company to topple the CORPs and rescue Grant before they take everything from him?