When Doctor Alexandra Penfield finds a strange stone at the end of her herb garden she sets about finding its origin. Already believing in the mystery of the cosmos, her search confirms what she has always something else runs the universe and she is part of that something else. Moving between a street in Como, Italy, and an Ohio fen she constructs her fashion house, Linear A, and simultaneously interacts with the Ones, that is, the Shawnee sect whose people lived on the land three hundred years before her father built her house on the hill. Alex moves between beauty and angst as the plot unravels.