Rranging from Southeast Asia to Mexico to Venice, Italy, and Venice, California, with characters as diverse as a therapist-in-training whose daughters prove far more complex than her patients, an ambitious East-L.A. gang member hired for violence, two scientists on the run in Marfa, Texas, a recovering addict in Singapore summoned by a powerful but desperate billionaire, a programmer near Silicon Beach whose game engine just might augur far more than he suspects, and at the very heart a 12-year-old girl who one rainy day in May sets out from Echo Park to get a dog only to find something else . . . something that will not only alter her life but threaten the world we all think we know and the future we take for granted.