Retired First Nations Temporal Agent Wilda just wants to run her Toronto shop, garb Time Tourists, and send them on their merry way into the past. She finds contentment in her cat, her sarcasm, and her whiskey. All that changes when a deathly ill Traveller literally fell onto her doorstep, setting off a chain of events which forces her to return to the job she’d retired from decades before.
The Agency sends her and her assistant, Mattea, back into three dangerous eras of history to find the disease vector threatening the life of every modern Traveller. She searches through a teeming desert bazaar amongst the luxury of the court of Mansa Musa. She explores the dark forests of pre-Columbian America, fighting against the heartbreak of true love. She gets entangled in the convoluted politics of twelfth century Norse-ruled Orkney, sifting through the horrific carnage of a murdered village.
If Wilda can’t return in time with the right pathogen, the modern scientists can’t synthesize a cure for the disease before all the Travellers fall ill. She has to navigate politics, bandits, camels, and midnight coup d'etats, complete her mission, and return to the present, or lose herself in the depths of her own purposely-forgotten past.
It’s difficult to get to a hospital in time when your aorta rematerialises in a different place than your heart.