Dawn Howard is a Janissary - trained since early childhood as a soldier, spy, assassin, and bodyguard. Her benefactor is C-SPEAR, the enforcement arm of a secretive global coalition. Her station is in the city of Nineveh, the world's largest producer of the miraculous super-fuel known as aether. And her world is simple and violent - until today.

A powerful bomb sits in the hands of terrorists, fellow Janissaries caged and trafficked like slaves, a target who seems to have vanished off the face of the Earth. The nature of her world means that she'll have to stack bodies to the 10th floor to find the truth, but in her way are warlords, billionaires, mafiosi, and revolutionaries, all with their own agendas. And to get to the heart of it, she has to ask the ultimate question: is this city really worth saving?