Matthias Ronay has grown up in the low gravity and great glass citadels of independent Luna—and in the considerable shadow of his father, a member of the council that governs Luna's increasingly complex society. But Matt feels weighed down on the world where he was born, where there is no more need for exploration, for innovation, for radical ideas—and where his every movement can be tracked by his father on the infonets. Matt and five of his friends, equally brilliant and restless, have planned a secret adventure. They will trick the electronic sentinels and slip out of the city for a journey to Farside. Their passage into the expanse of perpetual night will change them in ways they never could have predicted ... and bring Matt to the destiny for which he has yearned.