In seventeen-year-old Glori Rhodes's post-nuclear world, females (fees) have always lived separate from males (beasts) to keep the peace. Then Glori's mother secretly births a beast and Glori comes to love the male child. One day her five-year-old brother is taken in a beast raid, so Glori and her best friend Su plan to take him back. Their desperate rescue mission brings her to a strange city where she encounters men for the first time and learns there is more to her history than she's been told.