In the future, what's real and what's not is...complicated.

The year is 2210. The United States has recently recovered from an totalitarian government known as Akston Society, and survived climate change, though with great losses: a desert stretches from Wyoming to Minnesota. Cloning is legal, and artificial intelligence is stunted by regulation and international treaties. Mars is colonized, mostly, trade is flowing...and Larken Marche's fraternal twin brother may be a murderer.

The police have recorded footage of Larken's brother bludgeoning someone to death at a stoplight in the dregs of Portland. Even knowing that he was sleeping in the student dormitory at Brighton Academy when it happened, she can't deny her eyes: it was either him, or someone identical. Two strange new students who arrive at Brighton, one of whom appears a carbon copy to Larken herself, prompt her to investigate the mysterious benefactor who pays for her and her brother to attend the most widely acclaimed boarding school in the country.

What Larken discovers might free her brother, but to use it would destroy any hope of a future either of them have. In this ensemble-cast sci-fi thriller, Larken must decide whether to pursue legal means to gain her brother's freedom, which could jettison any hope of a future, or try to spring him with the help of her plucky friends, an act which could end with her in jail. The police want to question her, an extremist organization want her dead, and a woman too perfect and deadly to be real chases Larken and her friends through the pages of Evasion and Defiance.