During the Devolution Wars his name was Theo Bronkman - one of seven enlisted in a prefabricated family of orphans, strays and runaways to work on a top-secret government project called Nimbus. But that life has been long-forgotten, and he is now simply Peter Ambrose - a struggling jazz musician who makes his living implanting mental prosthetics into the skulls of those with the money and the desire to artificially expand their brainpower. But in a world awash in the artifacts of countless invented pasts - where faces and personalities can be changed as easily and often as clothing - even the most scrupulously suppressed memories can take on murderous lives of their own. And now Peter Ambrose is trapped in a nightmare suddenly, and violently, reawakened - in which someone is killing off his Nimbus brothers and sisters, one by one...