Kirk is a rich young man, partying on his twenty-first and filled with Atlantica Dream, the drug that makes the user experience such heightened sensuality that even to look at someone else is to make love to them.

But when he wakes, he’s not in his affluent neighborhood at all. He’s at the Mattock Markets, Ardross Major’s largest slave trade arena, and he is to be sold to the highest bidder. Being handsome, well hung and unblemished because of his upbringing, he’s expected to fetch a high price. Kirk soon discovers that power and money don’t mean a thing on the outer worlds of the system, and his new owner, an alien called the Schism who can bend the laws of the universe, uses him as bait in a trap for shifters—a notion he finds worse than being sold as an object.

Kirk is soon engaged in a race against time as he escapes from the Schism and sets out to warn a fledgling colony of platypus shifters who have been detected by the space amplifier. But what he discovers about why he ended up in the Mattock Markets will change the course of his life forever. Not only must he survive to help so many others, he must become a man, too.