They were born into glass. Raised in sterile bubbles, never touched by a single bacterium. The Lapins of theLangford Institute are human guinea pigs in an experiment that succeeded too well: they are perfectly, beautifully clean, and the world can never touch them. John Bogardus has spent his entire life in this antiseptic prison. Then he meets Anne, an outsider with dirt under her nails and chaos in her blood. He falls hard. But love between them is biologically impossible. Every kiss John gives Anne could kill her. Every touch carries the weight of extinction. When Mary, one of their own, marries a contaminated man and pays a terrible price, John and the other Lapins face an unbearable truth: they can never rejoin the human race as they are. The only escape is outward. They hatch a desperate plan to board the Orion Zeta and flee into space, searching for a world where being clean means being free. This is a haunting meditation on what makes us human: is it the germs we carry, the connections we risk, or the love we're willing to die for?
