In the not so distant (and nowhere near as bright) future, young Chantal Kiffer grew up, a ‘latch key kid,’ in a ‘Cold Zone;’ something that could best be described as a lawless modern day slum district. Orphaned before her teens, Chantal was adopted by her only aunt, who threw her out when she was sixteen. At eighteen Chantal was abandoned by her cowardly boyfriend when she told him she was carrying his child. Faced with the virtual death sentence of homelessness in the Cold Zone, Chantal is forced to turn to prostitution. Rescued from a considerable beating from a marauding rape gang by an escaped ‘lab experiment’, Chantal settles down to share her home with her mysterious rescuer for the winter.Erika is a highly illegal ‘project,’ a cloned human, modified with cybernetic implants and technology to be an assassin, with a dark secret in her past. Erika looks after, and nurses, a badly beaten and helpless Chantal, in exchange for nothing more than an uncomfortable couch to sleep on and some cast-off clothes to wear; the best deal that anyone had offered to the jaded street prostitute in a long time. Chantal becomes Erika’s first friend, and then later, her first lover. Becoming a highly successful upper-class call girl, Erika takes her one true love away from the life she knew in the lawless Cold Zone, and shows her what life could be like in a more civilised area, where the police still dare to go.