A war against a clone race called Deviants rages. Pitted against them and a deadly virus, humans are all but extinct. They live in secret, walled-in cities for protection, and only Exteriors, agents operating above the law, are allowed outside. A team is sent into the decimated Washington D.C. to evaluate its potential for recolonization. They find survivors, but not all of them are as they seem.Myth Fisher was a survivor. That was what she did. As a Cartographer in the Colony of Hand, she was one of the Outsiders, and that made her separate from the other Colonists. She existed to travel to the Outside of the Colony to scrounge for food and supplies in the place she knew as Dwindle. Her life was a battle between herself and the Undead, the creatures whose sickness had been wrought hundreds of cycles ago by the "Bad People." Her immunity has always saved her from experiencing that horrible transformation from person to beast, at least until her mentor returned with the very disease "the taint" was supposed to prevent her from contracting.As events begin to spiral out of her control, Outlanders head her way, and Oliver Dark is among them. An "Exterior" for the High Council, a group of supercomputers that rule the decimated remains of the new world after the Fourth World War, he serves as a hired hit-man and soldier for Probe, the Primary Reconnaissance of Overpopulation of Biological Entities. This company is the government, and the government is the company. And their sole purpose is to push back the Deviants, the clone race that the High Council created in the hundreds of years before. Forever at war with the copycat race and at the bidding of mysterious overlords known only to Dark as his Masters, Dark's purpose in Dwindle is to gain back much needed territory for the human race.When Dark and Fisher collide through a series of unexpected circumstances, they both realize that their worlds are not entirely what they appear to be. Inquiries into the outside world lead Fisher to believe that her life, and the lives of all those in Dwindle, is not as simple as it may have once appeared. And for Dark, her existence proves to be more problematic than he may have anticipated for himself, the High Council, his Masters, and the world.