Overpopulation, disease, and ecological disaster were edging humanity toward extinction. Hope arrived in the haan, an alien race that promised us a future. And what they wanted in exchange seemed so harmless... Sam Shao has found out too much about the haan, by accident. All humans have to get along with them--we owe them our lives--and Sam even counts a haan among her best friends. But the more she learns, the less she trusts them, and it doesn't help that the building of new haan colonies seems to be coinciding with a rash of missing persons cases.