Four very different young people are taken from four very different lives, and must learn to love the duty that is the reason they exist.
Barely adults yet already heading in very different directions, Erik, Elena, Lefu and Jing-Mai won't get to see any of their plans become reality. Variously attacked and abducted, the four strangers are plucked from their lives and awaken in a tree-house high in the jungle, with no phones, no wallets and no memory of the journey. Their captor, who calls herself Anna, refuses to tell them anything, simply setting them bizarre meditation-type exercises. Elena believes the strange things the woman says, which convinces Erik and Jing-Mai that she's Anna's spy, and Lefu is nearly too grief-stricken over the recent death of his girlfriend to care. Anna only reveals the truth of her words when the situation grows too tense to continue.
She tells them they are the same as she - members of a race called the Caylam; the enforcers of the Treaty in a war which is literally as old as time. And yet somehow learning the reason behind their abduction, and their existence, only raises more questions. A war? The Treaty? Caylam? What does any of it really mean?
They will have to decide, and soon, before they take their parts as soldiers.