In Saintstone everyone gets tattoos recording their deeds from birth until death, and the ink lets every other citizen know your triumphs as well as your sins; so when Leora's father dies and she sees glimpses a symbol of a horrible crime on the back of his neck she is horrified, and sure it is a mistake--and in her efforts to find out the truth she discovers the lengths that Saintstone will go to preserve its "perfect" society.

Jonas' life assignment is as the Receiver of Memory, where he will apprentice the Giver and become a storehouse of all the things humanity left behind when it entered utopia: color, emotion, and even more complicated secrets.