The novel follows fifteen-year-old Wisty and her eighteen-year-old brother Whit in a dystopian future where people can be brought up on charges of witchcraft.

Whit is reunited with his long-lost girlfriend Celia, who reveals that she's a half-light spirit that exists in an alternate dimension called the Shadowland.

Now part of a hidden community of teens like themselves, Whit and Wisty have established themselves as leaders of the Resistance, willing to sacrifice anything to save kidnapped and imprisoned kids.

At the same time, the villainous leader of the New Order is just a breath away from the ability to control the forces of nature and to manipulate his citizens on the most profound level imaginable: through their minds.

Wisty is falling for a mysterious and possibly untrustworthy stranger named Heath, and a new power now poses a threat to their world: a Wizard King that has come from the mountains to wage war.

[7] A reviewer for Booklist praised the prologue as "enticing" while criticizing the first entry by stating that the "meandering plot seems to make up the rules as it goes along.”.