On the way to enlightenment we meet many of Sparrow's friends and experience the Night Market, a large section of the city only open during darkness, ruled by "The Deal": everything is transactional.

After a cryptic Tarot reading from friend Sherrea, abduction by a dead man animated by what might as well be a Loa, and introduction to a Vodun-based community that is dedicated to replacing, by coup if necessary, the status quo in the city.

That includes the man most responsible for the inter-continental war, now at the city's power apex, a character who is also the revenge target of another survivor from his kind.

The second half of the story shows Sparrow's awkward progress toward a fully human condition and becoming a valued member of a community, and is capped by a closing conceit: that the whole telling has been an autobiography.

[1][2] Academic Veronica Hollinger termed the book "a feminist revision of 1980s cyberpunk", noting that its hard-boiled tone shared similarities to William Gibson's Neuromancer.