Regency College senior Julian Brehm, finds himself falling in love with Nina Rinaldi, a beautiful young revolutionary whose political activities against the authoritarian regime that rules the country and wages a deceitful, distracting war derails his uneventful student life. His love and moral alliance to Nina eventually lead him into an undercity beneath the metropolis, and then into the war zone itself, where mortal danger in that expanding cemetery of millions threatens Julian's life, but what he witnesses will alter how he perceives the Republic and ultimately his fate within it.