Mallory Hastings has been a "difficuit" patient from the moment she opened her eyes in a hospital in Oneonta, New York, following a minor automobile mishap. Terrified, hostile, and unaccountably mute (so that she must be retrained to use her own voice), she recognizes neither friends nor family and seems bent on rejecting every effort to help her back to her former condition of normalcy. Then a mysterious message reaches her from afar: First: You're not Mallory Hastings at all. Second: You don't know how you got where you are. Third: You're afraid to speak the truth to the people around you. Though she's never heard of the man who sent it, she grabs this lifeline and allows herself to be pulled out of the hospital into a world that is as unfamiliar to her as the woman who claims to be her mother. The man on the other end of the lifeline is Jason Tull, a man whose story is almost as strange as hers. The scion of a wealthy and powerful family, he could have had any kind of life he wanted. But when he left school, there was only one thing on his mind. Of all things, he had conceived a fascination for the phenomenon known as reincarnation.