Eighteen-year-old Rieka Spring has been determined all her life to piece together Gardian's fragmented historical record and reverse the oppressive Scorpio Code.  Violating the Code's "holy orders" is punishable by death, and Rieka's broken the first tenet: never show emotion. Unless she wants to be murdered for displaying her anger against the law's will, she must find and prove that a mythological weapon is more than a story before she's killed by the hauntingly familiar assassin sent to stop her.