A heroine and an unwilling antihero unknowingly cross paths only from a distance and their lives are changed forever.
Fifteen year old Caroline Westermarck enjoys a peaceful existence with her expatriate American family in Switzerland. She adapts easily to adventure, and with her grandfather at the steering wheel of their car, soars over the Alps with her best friend Marta on a road trip to Munich. During her visit to Germany, Caroline revels in the everyday pleasures of a teenage girl – seeing the sights and meeting nice boys. But exposure to the fringes of the migrant crisis in Europe – from discussion at the family dinner table to Muslin women and their children begging on the streets – is her first philosophical introduction to social conflict. It is a setting far removed from her life at home.
Pavel Vorotnikov is a young Russian man in an entirely different situation. He cannot take the violence fighting for a mercenary army in Syria and agrees to join a child trafficking operation in Europe. When he sees how the children are treated and is compelled to deal with the bodies of children that die in transit, he despises the gang members and even himself for what he has become.
The contrast is stark but fears and yearning are intertwined. From a Swiss mountainside park, Caroline’s father looks to the distant peaks and worries about war, famine and disease. Pavel inhabits a largely tranquil society but is not part of that dream.
In a delivery to Munich, Pavel plots revenge against the gang, and is awed beyond his wildest imagination when people he does not know courageously and unwittingly intervene.
Caroline's life also changes as she pays the price for men who invent a reason to go to war. It is a journey to death and suffering and sacrifice that once begun cannot be forgotten physically or emotionally.
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