The factory explosion leaves Hettie Sharpe with very little. No father. No mother. No home. Only new injuries, new scars, and a ghost. Already Hettie is an oddity. Too clever, too Irish, too much like her father, the eccentric inventor of machinery, peculiar and particular in her own right. Now, thrown into the hysteria of Fin de Siècle Spiritualism, Hettie finds herself questioning her own nature, the true articulation of her own self, just as she questions the ghost who appeared like a shadow from the horror of catastrophe. Where does it come from? What does it want? What is the kingdom of death, a place that seems to grow like a tree beneath the known surface of the world? What is the structure of time? Is it a Prime Meridian, or is it a ribbon, always unravelling? Who is Hettie Sharpe?