Ashur Yonan is going nowhere fast: an eighteen-year-old high school dropout living with a mom who doesn't understand him, mourning the death of his father five years earlier and working a dead-end food service job. The only good thing he has going for him is his girlfriend Kiki, but she's leaving soon for college on the East Coast. It's getting harder for Ashur to believe he still has the potential to make something great out of his life.

But after meeting with a mysterious stranger at his father's gravesite, strange things begin to happen. A representative from a shadowy organization known as the Academy comes to Ashur with an offer to join their latest recruiting class. Wary, but out of options, Ashur accepts--and enters a world of incredible new technology, cutthroat competition, and secrets that slowly begin to reveal themselves as he navigates his place at the Academy.

As Ashur pushes to learn more about the Academy, he also begins to uncover secrets about his own past, including a family history that traces back to the fall of the Shah during the Iranian Revolution, and a host of strange circumstances surrounding his father's death. Will he be able to learn the truth in time to save himself...and the world?