The book opens with Hiram Walker, a seventeen-year-old slave, almost drowning in the River Goose, just outside of the Walker Plantation where he was born and raised and has never left. But something saves him from the depths—a mysterious power that lifts him up and lands him a mile away, even as his half-brother and master, the passenger in the carriage Hiram drove, is lost in the river. His near-death experience puts Hiram of a mind to escape the only home he’s ever known, the plantation owned by his own father.