Two children, Patricia and Lawrence, have formative brushes with a deep and mysterious power in childhoods otherwise dominated by abuse, bullying, and misery. Patricia's experience is a single unexplained day of being able to speak the language of birds and meeting a Tree which tells her of her own magic and connection with nature. Lawrence's involves successfully building a time machine which jumps him two seconds into the future, and busing up to MIT to watch a rocket launch. Neither of these experiences make the kids very relatable to their peers, and through junior high they only have each other... until a sadistic guidance councilor with his own motives drives them apart. Things escalate until Patricia is literally cased out of school by a mob accusing her of witchcraft and Lawrence is sent to a super restrictive military boarding school. They don't see each other for many years until a chance encounter at a party in San Francisco. Lawrence is now deeply involved with a tech company trying to realize inter-space human colonization. Patricia is a full-fledged witch, working on assignment handing out curses and blessings to the unsuspecting. Around them, the world is falling apart: global climate change, massive super storms, degrading democracy and infrastructure, and international arms-rattling are all threatening the viability of human life on Earth. Lawrence's bosses want to "fix" the problem by abandoning the planet, while Patricia's want to "fix" the Earth by abandoning human civilization. In the midst of this, the pair are irritably drawn together by attraction and shared trauma.