"Keep your eye on Kage Baker! You never know where she's heading next, but it's always worth going there. She's an edgy, funny, complex, ambitious writer with the mysterious, true gift of story-telling." —Ursula K. Le Guin

The Botanist Mendoza was confined to the distant past as a punishment for betraying the Company and spent thousands of years there alone, only meeting her lover, Alec Checkerfield, when his timeship crashed in her cornfield. In ensuring his survival as he returned to his own time, she crossed the Company once more, and now she’s disappeared from her ancient prison, taken by the Company . . . but where? And when?

Alec joins forces with the Botanist Mendoza’s other former lovers, Nicholas and Edward, past versions of himself who died centuries ago, in an uneasy alliance to rescue Mendoza—an alliance made all the more precarious since the three of them are all stuck together in Alec’s body. To find her, they must work together, helped by Alec’s AI companion, Captain Morgan, first to find Mendoza, and then to discover the strange truth of their own origins. Only once they know what the Company has done to them can they begin to understand the vast ramifications of its plots within plots . . . and what they can do to stop it.