Paranoia already grips the passengers of experimental airship SolAir 523-a diversion to a research facility so near the forbidding American Wastelands, talk of spies aboard the flight, passengers secreted away. Quickly suspicions seemed confirmed. With a pop of static from the cockpit and a burst of flames from the auxiliary engines, SolAir 523 goes adrift over the Wastelands. With the flight crew dead and the cockpit sealed, Teah Lancey and her students must work with the other passengers of SolAir 523 to bring the crippled airship to the ground. Among the other passengers are a spy, an ex-soldier, and a banished president of a fallen state. Everybody aboard knows help is not coming, not as they drift across American skies, not once they reach the ground, but Teah and her students refuse to lose hope. As problems compound and sabotage becomes apparent, a few students start demonstrating unusual gifts of perception, strength, and healing. These are the outward signs of an old outlawed technology called the neural lace. Teah's son, she fears, might be the most gifted of them all.