Don Lucas Ferez, captain of the Border Guard, is tasked with keeping the ancient evils out of the peaceful South. When the Four Old Gods reappear, and slaughter his companion, he is first to sound the alarm. In the real world, Luke Green is at his wit's end. The Four are the main programmers of the world-spanning game Luke helped create-and they've found a way to subvert the players rich enough to have a Game interface implanted in their skulls. Things get very real, very fast for Luke, as he confronts the collision between in-Game politics and real world criminal activity. Twisted in around all of this, he meets Toni, a hacker in her own right. Together they take a good look at his relationships, past and present, and start to figure out who they are and want to be. Assuming they survive.