Eloise Carlisle has lived a perfect life with her physicist parents inside the walls of the Compound. They have everything they need in order to have a fulfilling existence, and there is never any violence or disorder. Sentinels, walls, and weapons protect them. But from what? When a dangerous stranger arrives in a helicopter and takes Eloise away, she is awakened to a world that she had never known existed. Armed with new knowledge of the past, Eloise has a choice to make about what kind of future she will help to establish. Will she go back to the Compound and be the obedient girl that she has always been? Or will she work with the Alliance to right the wrongs that she helped create?