The city is all that Bets has ever known. A precarious near-future world where safe housing, food, medicine and other necessities are hard to come by and all but the wealthy struggle mightily to survive. International supply chains are a thing of the past, and most goods come from prison workhouses, where slave labor is legal. The prisons are the biggest industry left in the US, and the slightest misstep can you get disappeared to one of these workhouses, never to be seen again. Bets' own parents were disappeared when she was young and she grew up in a junkyard, doing what she must to survive. Now, as an adult, she's just barely scratched out a life for herself. Even though the chaos and peril of the city increases each year, Bets would never think to leave- until she's thrust into a dangerous situation where she must flee in order to save her own life. She seeks advice from Beryl, the kindly man who runs the junkyard where she lived as an orphan, and he divulges a startling secret from her past- and encourages her to go west, into the desert, as far as she can.

All Bets has heard of the rural western United States is that over the decades it's been abandoned, both by people and the state- drought, disease, contamination and the collapse of infrastructure and supply chains have emptied the desert. In her search for a contraband map with which to navigate Bets finds an old guidebook, An RVer's Guide to the American West. With this, a stolen bicycle, and rumors- that somewhere, in the desert, people have found a way to survive- she sneaks past the checkpoints of the city and pedals into the sunset, her sights set on Nevada.