In the seconds after Fetter is born, his mother kills his shadow. He grows up shadowless, at times weightless, floating off into the clear air. His mother trains him for a series of violent missions, beginning with matricide and ending with the murder of the Perfect and Kind, a revered and powerful spiritual leader—and Fetter’s own father. Launched out onto his own at thirteen, Fetter tries to abandon his prophecy, but it has a way of coming back to him. The world of the story is deeply unfamiliar and yet also somehow entirely real, in a city where any closed door can instantly become “bright”—no longer open or accessible to humans and yet seeming to share a border with strange other worlds. Entangled within Fetter’s life are other tales: about what happens when you change the world and it keeps on changing, about revolution and sedition, and about the substance of something as insubstantial as a shadow.