A quest, a puzzle, and multiple lives:

Jubilee is a bold young woman of seventeen, on the cusp of leaving the security of her family home to seek out her own future. But her life is thrown into tumult by a visit from a forbidding stranger who has come looking for Jubilee's beloved brother, Jolly—who is seven years dead.

Jolly died as a child, consumed in an unprecedented flood of "silver"—a mysterious substance resembling a thick, glowing fog. Silver is a force of both destruction and creation. Sometimes it dissolves what it touches, at other times it randomly rebuilds structures from the lost past, but no person caught within its reach has ever survived it.

And yet . . .

If Jolly is truly dead, how could this stranger know him? And if Jolly is alive, how did he survive the silver? And where has he gone? Jubilee soon discovers that the stranger is not the only person interested in her brother’s fate.

Looming over all is the question of the silver’s nature and purpose. Silver is rising in the world, flooding ever more often and more deeply so that someday soon the world must drown in it.

Determined to find answers, Jubilee leaves home one step ahead of a ruthless pursuit. The quest she undertakes will unlock the memory of a past reaching back farther than she ever imagined.