Like Conrad's hero Marlowe, V. I. travels to a human-created hell, where the powerful consider themselves gods with a license to tyrannize, inflict mental and physical pain, and decree life and death. A freak incident unleashes the brutality and misery V. I. encounters. V. I. and friends attend the bash. Later, driving home with her friends through the inner city, V.I. spots a woman lying in the street and, at the last moment, swerves and misses her. The woman dies in the hospital from advanced peritonitis from a ruptured small intestine.
Surreal events follow.
The police report from the scene, contradicting these charges, disappears. The woman's body vanishes from the morgue, foiling the autopsy. The dead woman proves to be Nicola Aguinaldo, an escapee from Coolis, an Illinois women's penitentiary. Stealing a necklace from her rich employer, Robert Baladine, for whom she worked as a nanny. Baladine heads Carnifice Security, a billion-dollar P. I. and security corporation, which runs Coolis for the state.