Lyla Northstrom lives in a society where only the brightest and the best have a chance to go on to university. The rest are left to accept their lot and scrape by in a life of poverty, or join the Red Fists, a highly criminal and dangerous rebel group. After a misstep, Lyla is tattooed—Marked—as a criminal. Humiliated and all but ruined, she is on the verge of losing hope when she is offered a chance at redemption. She jumps at the chance, but it comes at a cost. Doing what is right means betraying the boy she has come to love, and perhaps losing even more than she thought possible. Graphic-novel-style vignettes revealing the history of her world provide Lyla with guidance and clues to a possible way out of the double bind she finds herself in, but even they may not be what they seem.