Paige is supposed to be a true believer. As her strict religious community's chosen ritual sacrifice—the highest honor!—she's supposed to be pure, the kind of Ritualist who can transcend body and space and time and turn death into life for her neighbors. She knows that the fate of their souls rests in her hands, and she knows she can't deliver. Not when she doesn't know what to do with the inappropriate sexual attraction she's feeling toward another girl—her best friend, Mott. Not when Paige knows she's not pure, that they chose the wrong girl. When her brother, Sol, gets himself arrested and Mott follows suit, Paige's doubts start to take over. Sol and Mott are the best, most honest people she knows, and as their arrests turn into a dual death sentence for challenging their collective religion, Paige finds her beliefs crumbling. Powerless to help them directly, she falls in with a resistance group and commits to doing the unthinkable: killing their religion's leader. Stuck between bad and worse, Paige must decide which is better: the strict, zealous love their religion preaches, or fighting for the freedom to search for her own version of "home"—even though she might never find it.