The time is 2060.

Twenty years earlier, after a military coup and two civil wars, Russia and China negotiated the Treaty of London, which divded the former United States of America into two seperate nations--the conservative New Confederation of America and the liberal Federal States of America--sharing the exact same borders.

In those 20 years of peace, instead of the two nations learning to live together in the same space, they grew apart--the Federals based in the cities and Confederates controlling the countryside in between. The NCA devolves into an oligarchical, white, male nation controlling rural areas of the country--with women and minorities denied the same rights, many of them escaping to the cities to become Federal citizens, like Christie Rogers, who left her hometown in Texas to become a Federal citizen, but works as a dancer in an upscale New York City gentlemen's club frequented by Confederate Wall Street bankers.

Against the advice of her college roommate, Carol Stanton boards a bus to attend her grandmother's funeral in Denver, only to be taken by Commander Martin Carpenter III of the Sixth Texas Militia. Fleeing the pursuing forces of the Russians and the Chinese, she becomes pregnant with Carpenter's child and is forced to marry him.

Her abduction after a hijacking of the bus--following a raid on Fort Riley, Kansas, where Federal, Chinese and Russian troops were killed--attracts the attention of Russian President Vladimir Kruchevsky... which unintentionally reveals a secret from his past, threatening both 20 years of unsteady peace--and his political future.