By encouraging massive accumulations of debt, a single corporation, Caerus, controls all aspects of society. Inesa lives with her brother in a half-sunken town, barely scraping a living from their taxidermy shop. But their mother has secretly accrued enormous debt – and the only way out is to offer her daughter up to be a sacrifice for Caerus’s livestreamed assassination event: the Lamb’s Gauntlet.

Melinoë is the assassin chosen for this spectacle. The product of years of neural reconditioning and physiological alteration, she’s a living weapon, famous for her cold brutality and deadly beauty. But she’s also haunted by her failure in the last gauntlet, when she broke down live on screen. 

But as Mel pursues Inesa across the wasteland, each determined to claim victory, they begin to question what they’ve been taught. Could there be more to life than survival? Could they be capable of more than death? Could they, against all the odds, be falling in love?