Sixteen year-old runaway Dara Adengard holds an incredible healing light in the palm of her hand. Which would be pure awesomeness, except that she hasn’t got much time to cure anyone due to the fact that other problems seem a lot more urgent. When your own cousin wants you dead and others want you alive (but caged in a lab), your best recourse might be to just stay below the radar and totally off the grid.

When Dara Adengard embarks on a perilous mission to take back the healing Lightband that was wrested from her grasp, two people stand in her way—her cousin Mercy, who has the power to afflict instead of heal, and Santos, the head of a shadowy group about to unleash a deadly virus onto a fragile, damaged world.

Her wrist shattered in a fall, Dara is airlifted to a secret government medical facility where a newly found fragment of element 120-X—main component of the Lightband—is implanted in her wrist bone, enabling her to heal with her hand. The medical facility comes under assault, and Dara escapes to the California desert with the help of an enigmatic Jamaican martial arts expert named Seb. Still bearing emotional wounds from her mother’s death, Dara trains for the gathering storm. When the desert hideout is attacked, Dara sets out alone to reunite with Diego, the boy she’s fallen in love with, and their faithful dog Linc.

Determined to find and take back her mother’s stolen birthright, Dara discovers the stunning secrets of her own family’s buried past and the extraordinary DNA code that flows in her veins.