In the gigantic metropolis of New Croydon—apparently lifted straight from the pens of Kafka and Dickens, with Bosch and Neal Stephenson acting as intermediaries—people and beetle-headed hephri, mermaids and water spirits, handmade mutants-reworked and cactus-people live side by side. Everyone is busy with their own business: the hephri sculpt statues out of colored slime, drug dealers sell sleepy dope, and the police hunt down dissidents. And then the scientist Isaac Dan der Grimbebulin is visited by a wingless garuda—a man-bird from far desert lands—and asks him to teach him how to fly again. Meanwhile, Isaac’s beetle-headed lover, Lin, receives an even more complicated assignment: to sculpt a portrait of a powerful mafia boss. Isaac and Lin still don’t know what kind of danger those orders entail—for themselves, for the entire city, and even for the very structure of reality…