Mersine is a Brain Police officer who investigates mind-sucking cases, which are cases when criminals involuntarily wipe someone’s mind and take their consciousness to resell on the black market. Her latest case is an up-and-coming actor named Savoy, whose mind was sucked for his talent. Mersine decides to go to the Downs, a criminal area of the city, to look for leads on Savoy’s mind. Her superiors implant an “imp” in her mind, which is another personality that will help her maintain her undercover status when questioned by criminals. The imp’s name is Marya, a “memory-junkie” whose desire for other people’s thoughts will provide an alibi for why she’s looking for Savoy. Before she leaves, a man calls the office and says he is Savoy; apparently, Savoy's mind has split into personas of characters he's played as an actor, and now those personas are trying to take over the bodies of the people who purchased and implanted pieces of Savoy's mind. This gives Mersine leads on where to look. Mersine starts her investigation with Coney Loe, one of the information holders of the mind-sucking world. Coney tells her (as Marya) about Monkey Shock, a place where people can go to get memories electrically zapped into them. She leaves to go find it, but instead sees Rowan, Savoy’s wife, walking through the street. Suspicious, Mersine follows her and a male stripper named Hercules to a kink crib, where she sees them mind-linked with the man who called her earlier as Savoy. When Rowan and Hercules leave, Mersine mind-links with the man and he tells her that he’s one of many offshoots of Savoy’s brain struggling to gain control over their host bodies. Before she can find out anymore, Hercules and Rowan return and zap her, which allows Marya to take dominant control.  With Marya as the dominant mind, they walk around the Downs looking for additional clues and encountering various other undercover informants before they find a man named Anwar, who holds one of Savoy’s personas, along with Coney Loe. They zap her again and cause her personalities to shift in and out uncontrollably. Soon, Rowan arrives with multiple other hosts of Savoy’s personalities and the box with his brain in it. They decide to wipe Marya/Mersine and replace her with a complete Savoy, but before they can finish, other Brain Police officers arrive and stop them from wiping her. She finds out that Mersine was never the original personality and they were both variants of an actress named Marceline, although Marya now holds control over the brain. She decides to resign from the police force, but she knows that Mersine is still inside her somewhere and will eventually resurface.