Zukun City, capital of the modern world. Alice Lockwood has never seen it before, but now her City-residing mother has fallen ill and, naturally, Alice wants to go see her. And so she ends up in the terrifying, beautiful, insane bright lights of the big city. Her first stop is the Archives, in search of a cure for the so-named 'City Fever' that's affected her mother, and it's there she meets Timmy Hawthorn, who seems to be the only person in the City willing to help her. And then comes the bio-terrorism, the murder accusations, the hacking of the government system, the monorail hi-jacking, and the totally unbelievable but completely true conspiracy theories.