In the year 2040, millions of young Americans are forced to bear the scars of a genetic disaster wrought on their parents by careless energy companies, who attempted to harvest energy from their bodies' process of cellular respiration. Despite catastrophic levels of genetic disease and disability, this generation of mostly poor people of color take the country and the world by storm. Rain and her university friends are proud to belong to this unique cohort, but everything changes when a sheltered, well-off classmate takes interest in Rain.