The South Asian Province is split in two. Uplanders live in a luxurious, climate-controlled biodome, where technology keeps them healthy and youthful forever. Outside, the poor and forgotten scrape by with black-market robotics in slums threatened by rising sea levels, unbreathable air, and deadly superbugs. Ashiva works for the Red Hand, an underground network of revolutionaries fighting the government, which is run by a merciless computer algorithm that dictates every citizen's fate. As a smuggler with the best robotic arm and cybernetic enhancements the slums can offer, her cargo includes the city's most vulnerable abandoned children. When the brilliant Uplander hacker Riz-Ali stumbles into the Red Hand's dangerous activities, he and Ashiva uncover a horrifying conspiracy that the government will do anything to bury. As armed guardians kidnap children, massive robots flatten the slums, and a pandemic threatens to decimate the city, Ashiva and Riz must put aside their differences to fight the system and save the communities they love from destruction.