Dragonfly's body is not her own. Dragonfly is a combat doll: a living machine consigned to a life of endless bloodshed. Her fate is to be gripped until death by cruel engineering, whose strictures reward violence with pleasure, and threaten those who abstain with a fate far worse than death. When a single miserable stroke of fate strips her of both the women she's come to love, Dragonfly is in search of someone to blame, and she finds it in Torvei: a doll whose strange faith seems to poison the air around her. She expects her revenge will be a simple matter. Death, after all, is in her nature. But Torvei's connections run deeper than Dragonfly dares to imagine, and she may come to regret the things she is made to learn, before her work is done.