Siberia 1923. Romantic, dreamer and revolutionary, Alexandra is a commissar in the newly formed Soviet government, hunting for a missing Agit Propaganda train. Its crew of actors, film-makers, poets and artists has disappeared in the mountainous wilderness beyond Yakutsk. More disturbing is the immense factory complex left by the retreating White army, and the bizarre machinery they abandoned that hints at a science far beyond anything she's encountered before.
Banjo had it all sorted. One last voyage ferrying Russian aristocrats from Vladivostok to Shanghai and then he'd find easier work as a marine engineer in Yokohama. That was before he was press-ganged and dragged into the frozen wilderness. Now everyone else is dead and he's trapped in an abandoned boiler in a massive ironworks, surrounded by communists out for his blood. He has one chance to escape before either the Reds find him or he's finished off by the barely-glimpsed creatures that live in the labyrinthine cellars below these unholy factories.
Flung together by chance, the passionate idealist and the two-fisted Yorkshireman find themselves stumbling across a monstrous conspiracy that threatens to destroy the world.