"When, after years of secrecy, Ariel Rankin learns that her birth father is not who she had always believed he was, but rather a man named Kip Calder who went to Vietnam before she was born and then disappeared into Laos as a covert warrior, her once irrefutable world is shaken to its core. For years, Ariel tries to ignore this shattering discovery, but when she herself becomes pregnant by a man who wants no part of parenthood, she realizes she can no longer elude her buried past if she is to have any future. She decides to leave behind her life in New York City and everything she knows to head west to find the mysterious Calder." Ariel's search will lead her from the holy village of Chimayo, New Mexico, where world wanderer Kip was last seen, to Los Alamos and the pueblo valley of Nambe, and ultimately across the restricted, pitiless badlands of the White Sands proving grounds. Morrow conjures an array of dynamic, strong-willed individualists whose own distinct quests converge with Ariel's. There's Franny Johnson, who has shed her past in Gallup to pursue the dream of Hollywood; Marcos Montoya, who with his family of Nambe horse breeders has adopted the fragile Kip; Delfino Montoya, whose downstate ranch was confiscated by the government to test the first atom bomb; and Kip himself, who fights his final war even as he is about to come to the reconciliation that will restore his humanity.