Marooned in the wastelands of Conrad's World when his family's ship crashed en route to the city of Morningstar, five-year-old Cale remembers very little, except that his father told him to mention his last name, Alexandros, only to the people they were going to visit. For years, he is a slave, shuffled between groups of exiled thugs, until a trader offers him a way out.
On the subsequent journey, Cale finds, in ruins deep in the desert, a strange metal book in an entirely unfamiliar language. Crossing the bridge to Morningstar and finding work, he also finds the Resurrectionists, who search for the truth about an alien civilization that used to exist on Conrad's World.