Following on from her brilliant previous novel, Natural History, Justina Robson again takes into a series of worlds and dimensions we would have never thought of on our own Metropolis is a city of superheroes where you can become anyone you like - fight all day, party all night...Sankhara is a universe where everything is remade by night, according to the inhabitants' deepest, darkest dreams...Koker Ai exists in another time and space, where Intana, less favoured courtesan in the court of a decaying empire, has just discovered a warrior who cannot die...Jalaeka has been many things in his short lifetime: a war captive, a prostitute, a pilgrim, a pirate, a princess in a glass coffin and a physics student at MIT. Now he's looking for someone to make him into something better, for the entity which created him is coming to take him back. Francine is a fifteen-year-old runaway, out to find a definition of love she can believe in. She finds a Palace whose rooms are made of bone, flowers and the hearts of heroes. She finds a scientist looking for the lost light of the universe. She finds herself at the centre of an unstoppable conflict that began long before she was born.