Winning battles means Ink honors, prestige, and life itself. …Yet nobody understands what losing truly means.

On another planet two hundred years in the future, twenty-one-year-old Isla Jane struggles helplessly to figure out who she is and what her world really means.

Marked with a forbidden tattoo of the rising sun, she is a natural champion of humanity and a gifted warrior in Heats– lavish battles fought in the conjoined minds of the participants for the morbid amusement of the masses.

Despite Isla’s desire to fade into the background, she emerges as an obvious leader of her people when the senseless assassination of a youth forces her to face the truth. Her volatile world, disguised by its elaborate battles and constant mayhem, is a prison without bars and a coffin, the lid already half-closed, that they must escape.

But when she vows to find a way to bring her people back home, Isla will have to deconstruct consciousness and the very nature of the space time…