Medical student Amy Brenner has dreaded her required overnight rotation assigned to Ward D, the hospital's locked inpatient mental health unit, so when patients and staff being to disappear during her shift, Amy is convinced her worst fears are coming true.

In the near future, a young woman finds her mother's body on the kitchen floor in Queens and sets on a journey through language, archives, artificial intelligence, and TV for a way back into herself. She begins to translate an old manuscript about a group of female medical students-- living through a drought and at the edge of the war-- as they create a new way of existence to help the people around them. In the process, the translator's life and...