Fred lives in the fishing village of Del Mar north of what's left of San Diego nearly three decades after the Change. Fred has never seen a movie, heard recorded music, traveled faster than his rollerblades will move him. Like his peers he takes certain miracles for granted—blazing salamanders, mating sea serpents, the ability to affect reality with a rightly chosen word—but regards the claims of pre-Changers with outright skepticism. How else could he react to people who claim they landed on the moon?

Despite his father's objections Fred is working to discover the underlying order to the principles by which the world now works. Fred and his friend Yan Ramchandani experiment to learn the laws of magic—to become the New Scientists.

But where Fred is filled with scientific curiosity, Yan is ambitious and impatient. Obsessed with the technology of the world before the Change, Yan feels that since those who understood the old laws ruled the old world, those who understand the new laws will rule this one.

When Fred and Yan's inevitable break occurs, its repercussions are unexpected, dangerous, and global. Fred has no choice but to leave behind the idyll of his village and set out after his old friend—an act that also puts his father back upon the road he thought he'd long abandoned, in the company of a past he thought he'd long escaped.

Fred's journey up the west coast of California puts him in the company of fellow travelers human and otherwise, in a world in which a halted civilization's impact is eroding and its very builders have become marginalized and even hunted. On the way he'll learn about the heavy price of obligation and the fearful acceptance of the old as it yields to the new.