A woman wakes up in a rain-soaked alley with no memory of who she is or how she got there. Two strangers, Perrin and Joaquim, find her and offer to take her in. When asked, she tells them her name is Nika.

Fast forward to five years later. Nika leads an armed team, including Perrin and Joaquim, in an infiltration of a transportation headquarters on Mirai. They break into the data vault and corrupt the passenger records so they can travel without being tracked. A discussion back at their base, The Chalet, reveals the larger purpose of the group, which calls itself ‘NOIR’: fighting an increasingly repressive government and searching for people who have vanished in the last several years.

Dashiel Ridani, an elite Industry Advisor, discovers that shipments of his company’s new product, a virtual limb augment, have been stolen while in transit to retailers. At a meeting between Advisors and the Guides—the leaders of the Dominion government—the Guides brush off the theft in favor of pressuring a Justice Advisor, Adlai Weiss, to apprehend the members of NOIR and bring an end to their disruptive activities. Afterwards, the Guides meet in secret, debating how they can shut NOIR down and hinting at some greater threat to the Dominion.

At The Chalet, one of NOIR’s top hackers, Parc Eshett, shows off a new virtual limb augment he’s installed.

Nika heads to another Dominion world, Namino, to purchase new equipment from a Taiyok merchant named Xyche. The Taiyoks are a winged alien species known for their cloaking capabilities. While on Namino, she spends an afternoon with her occasional lover, Grant.

Joaquim attends the criminal trial of a former friend. During the trial, he recalls the last time he’d seen his friend, when Joaquim’s lover Cassidy was murdered during a police raid on their apartment. After the raid, Joaquim turned his back on that life to start a new one on Mirai.

Dashiel visits Chosek, the homeworld of the Chizeru, a diminutive, pre-industrial alien species. Chosek is rich in kyoseil, a rare mineral Asterions use to enhance their bio-synthetic bodies and many of their technologies, and the Chizeru mine the kyoseil for Asterion businesses.

Later, Dashiel replays a memory from five years earlier. In it, he and a woman make love; their pillow talk involves a series of outpost disappearances on Dominion exploratory worlds. She is worried the Guides are involved and plans to hack into government files in search of evidence. The next night, she disappears; Dashiel has searched for her ever since, to no avail.

On a distant exploratory world, Advisor Gemina Kail oversees the destruction of a lab outpost. The employees living there are gassed, loaded into stasis chambers and shipped to a secret space station.

Nika returns to The Chalet to learn that Parc has been arrested for burglary. She reaches out to a NOIR contact in Justice, Spencer Nimoet, who sneaks her inside the jail to see Parc. He acts very unlike himself—passive and unconcerned about his plight.

Nika, Perrin and Joaquim try to figure out what might have happened to Parc to explain his behavior. Nika and Perrin go see the merchant he purchased the new limb augment from, who tells them the manufacturer is Ridani Enterprises and gives them one of the augments so they can test it.

Another NOIR hacker, Cair, finds a hidden virutox in the augment software. It attaches itself to a user’s OS then alters their programming, decreasing impulse control and emotion expression.

Nika, Joaquim and a NOIR robotics specialist, Ryan, infiltrate Ridani Enterprises in a bid to uncover more about the augment and possibly the virutox. Nika is hacking into the server in the CEO’s office when Dashiel returns to work and discovers her there. During a tense standoff, her disguise fails, and he recognizes her as the woman from his memory, his lost love who vanished. He asks her to meet him the next day, then urges her to leave before security arrives.

At the meeting, amidst lots of angst on both sides, Dashiel tells Nika she used to be a diplomatic Advisor. He reveals she is a descendant of the fabled First Generation, who led the Asterions across galaxies in search of a new home when their rebellion against the Anaden Empire failed. After recounting the events leading up to her disappearance and his search for answers, he tells her about a psyche backup she kept.

Nika visits the bank where the backup was stored, but her account was emptied out the same day she woke up in an alley with her memory erased. She confronts Dashiel in his home, accusing him of being involved in her psyche-wipe. Devastated at the realization he will never get back the woman he loved and desperate to prove his sincerity, he asks her to experience (‘simex’) one of his memories from their time together. Secretly wanting to glimpse the woman she supposedly used to be, she agrees.

The memory is of a party at Maris Debray’s loft nine years ago. Nika, Dashiel, Maris and Adlai are all clearly friends, and they banter for several minutes before Nika and Dashiel retire to the balcony together. They snuggle, kiss and drink champagne while they chat about an upcoming interstellar mission by the starship Shorai.

The memory leaves Nika disoriented and drowning in unfamiliar emotions. She tells Dashiel that woman is gone forever, then starts to leave. But the lingering memory overwhelms her, and she embraces him instead. In a torrent of passion and turbulent emotions, they make love.

In the dead of night, Parc is convicted and transported to the Zaidam Bastille prison. There, he and other convicts are herded into stasis chambers and knocked unconscious.

The next morning, Nika and Dashiel share moments both tender and troubled before going their separate ways. Dashiel tells Adlai about the virutox implanted in his stolen augments and implores him to investigate. He then goes to check on Parc as a favor to Nika, only to find Parc has already been sent to Zaidam.

Dashiel tells Nika the bad news, and they meet with Joaquim and Perrin. He and Joaquim instantly clash, arguing over the best course of action. Dashiel confides to Nika that his Advisor status will allow him entry to Zaidam, but to break Parc out will mean the end of Dashiel’s career and turn him into a fugitive.