When a man awakens from cryogenic sleep on a desert planet, stricken with amnesia and low on supplies, his race to remember becomes as urgent as his struggle to survive.
Abandoning his escape pod in search of the ship that brought him here, he encounters androids wandering the sands and is puzzled to find that they too have no memories. But each encounter reveals a fragment of his life in Wintercity, the cold metropolis where he designed mind-altering drugs for Muramato Laboratories, a pharmaceutical company run by his former friend Raymond Barnes.
Resentful of how Ray has profited from his research, the man seeks revenge, even as he’s pulled into a police investigation of a citywide drug epidemic. When the investigation implicates a young woman he has fallen for, his attempts to protect her unravel a conspiracy involving black markets, prostitution rings, even android theft. Each thread is a clue, not only to Muramato Laboratories’ shady dealings, but to the man’s desert amnesia. He must make sense of it all, even though the truth might destroy him.