The dystopian thriller is narrated by an unnamed white man, who discovers the mutilated body of a young woman hanging from a tree. He is arrested for the crime and thrown into the back of a police van, but en route to a location out of town, the van crashes and the narrator finds himself the sole survivor. Panic-stricken, he wanders the streets of Paris trying to piece together what happened, soon realizing, with a “piercing sense of déjà vu,” that he has been transported twelve years into the future. The novel then follows a trajectory of malevolent discovery: The narrator has no reflection, his body has morphed into that of another person, and he can kill others with his maniacal stare. He is neither dead nor alive, a “Bastard With No Name, neither chosen nor condemned, an In-Between, a remanence,” hiding from a government that has devised a method of collective mind control. Only the Noir, a disparate group of nonwhites who fight “not to change anything but just to avoid disappearing altogether,” can help him.