Scarlet Benoit's grandmother has vanished, and the police have closed the file. Left to run the family farm outside Rieux in southern France on her own, Scarlet is certain Michelle Benoit did not simply walk away — and just as certain that nobody is going to help her prove it.
The one person who seems to know anything is Wolf, a quiet street fighter from the local tavern who moves like nothing quite human and who offers to take her to Paris, where the people who took her grandmother were last seen. Half a world away, the cyborg mechanic Linh Cinder breaks out of New Beijing prison in a stolen ship with an escaped military cadet named Carswell Thorne, pursued by a Lunar queen who means to have the Eastern Commonwealth and its young emperor — by marriage if she can, and by war if she cannot.
Marissa Meyer's second Lunar Chronicle retells Little Red Riding Hood as science fiction and braids it into the story begun in Cinder. The red hood, the grandmother's farmhouse and the wolf on the road are all present, and each of them turns out to mean something the fairy tale never said.