Ana is a disabled eighth grader who lives on a lunar civilization after the Eugenic War. She's currently on a field trip to an archaeological dig site — an abandoned castle. The castle is named Castle Jordan after its owner, who fought in the Eugenic War. It's got all the trappings of a castle, from intense defenses (such as "murder holes") to gaudy statues of the owner. Ana gets anxious staring up at space through the clear ceiling of the place, despite the "tactical putty" in her pocket and her friend Tiago. She blinks up information on the Internet to distract herself, able to connect despite the school's blockers because of military override codes given to her by her grandmother.
Those same codes allow her to slip through alarms and sensors unnoticed, which she does when she sees a secret passageway. She climbs the stairs and ends up in a tower room with the corpse of Jordan himself. If that isn't creepy enough, she gets locked in with the automated butler, who airlocks the room and starts a sequence to simulate atmospheric conditions on a different planet. After Ana is able to stop this by shooting the butler with her cane and stretching her putty across the fireplace, she finds out that this was done in order to listen to a record from another planet in the same atmospheric conditions it came from, to ensure purity and clarity. Ana listens to the record in air she can breathe.