Robbed of the powerful object she needed to save her mother, time traveler Etta Spencer is stranded far from home and the privateer she loves before resolving to destroy the astrolabe, a mission that is challenged by a shattering revelation.

Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her...