In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. The members of the labor class are descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China. In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan's journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight and to a faraway charter village in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind.