Lin Xia wanted to remain a student.

Instead, foreign analysts begin connecting her to impossible advances, state officials compete for her time, and hostile operators close in around her family, friends and university life.

While Lin Xia struggles to understand what her power has been teaching her, the people hunting the source behind China's technological breakthroughs move from surveillance to recruitment, then from capture to assassination.

Protected by guards she never asked for and surrounded by people unwilling to let her disappear into the machinery of the state, Lin Xia must survive long enough to decide what she wants to become.