Abelone Jensen, a World Health Organization field epidemiologist, is sent to the remote shores of Greenland to investigate a caravel thawing from a glacier. This ship is believed to be the Trojan horse that spread the fourteenth-century plague from Asia to Europe. What Abelone finds there is horrifying: a virus that transforms people into single-minded creatures whose only goal is to spread the infection to others. As the virus spreads, she tries to gather everything needed to develop a cure whilst struggling to answer the one question that haunts her: can the infected be saved, or should they die?