Nick Stone has escaped his stepfather, sort of. The man follows him, dragging at his sanity with malevolent comic relief. Hank, The Steps, is not the only problem. The boy is broken and naively innocent, when he walks into Thomas Cates' world of pain. Cates is on a mission to save the world, one girl at a time. Nick is protected by a sixteen-year-old hero and a precious six-year-old playmate. Can they save him from the dystopia he was born to?