Detective Jay Steiger is an outlier among the Stripes, Inter-World's law enforcers who keep order across the 132 settled solar systems. His battered Stetson and stubborn independence set him apart from his ex-military peers, but it's the AI deputy in his head?Tee?that makes him truly unique. Jay's ambition is simple: earn permanent Lone Wolf status and finally unlock the sealed files on his father's mysterious death. When a notorious assassin flees to the mining world of Herald, Jay sees his chance for promotion.

As Jay and Tee close in, a catastrophic anomaly in the Luna DNA database forces Tee to break the ultimate taboo, transforming from an AI into an entity that Inter-World fears above all: a Sentient Computer Lifeform, a SCoL, that almost destroyed humanity in not one but two previous wars. Now, Tee's SCoL existence is forbidden by law, forcing them to escape Jay's mind and inadvertently putting him in the gun sites of a murderous Shènglì assassin.

With Jay's and Tee's lives hanging by a thread, the two must work together as they discover a conspiracy rooted in the shifting boundaries between humans and SCoL and the war between them. In a universe where trust is rare and identity is everything, Jay and Tee's taboo partnership is tested by forces both within and beyond their own minds.