Canada in the 21st century is transformed by plague and dominated by the ruling Church of the Survivors. Lily Dalriada, an outcast who risked contracting the plague when she conceived a child outside the Church's sanctioned methods, is arbitrarily chosen as the unlikely saint by the Church elite. On the run, separated from her daughter and pursued by the Church, she finds refuge in the shadowy resistance movement. Hidden in a safe-house with a designer of virtual sex holidays, she finds a door into virtual history: plague-dominated Florence in two difference centuries, medieval and Renaissance. There, she struggles to understand a previous Plague Saint amid this ancient city-state's dark and sensuous complexity, haunted, as is 21st century North America, by the spectre of monolithic control.