The narrator’s name is Alan in the present and Briar in the past, which occurred five years earlier. The narrator recounts the moment their mother left them with her friend Leif, as she had to replace her sister in a factory to prevent her sister from losing the job, and thus couldn’t care for the children. When their mother’s house is condemned, Leif takes them to an empty house, leaves them with a week’s worth of tinned food, takes their passports and money, and is never seen again.
The narrator, Briar, and her younger sister, Rose, occupy the house and eat the tinned food, occasionally venturing to the field behind the house, where there are horses. Colon, a local child, accosts them, amazed they lack ‘educators’, devices that provide information and monitor users. He suspects they are ‘unverifiables’, people who are non-documented, disabled, or deemed dangerous, although the state, as depicted, no longer exists. The country is run by powerful corporations with no visible democracy. It’s a surveillance state where those compliant have documentation allowing freedom and property ownership. Others, deemed unfit, are re-educated for factory work or eliminated. Briar and Rose, home-schooled by their mother, are highly literate and never use their real names, frequently changing identities when questioned. Readers will gradually understand that Briar is non-binary.
Rose befriends a horse in the field, picking buttercups, thinking they are poisonous for horses. Colon informs them the horses are to be destroyed for meat and other purposes. Briar meets Oona, an older woman adept at evading cameras and recordings. She likes Briar for their originality and lack of an educator, advising about a local library due for destruction but still intact. Schools are shut, and children are educated on devices now. Briar is overwhelmed by the library’s knowledge and information.
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