If one cannot live alone, without attachment, under what authority ought responsibility for one's life be shared? A child recruit, IRA sniper Eoin is still a teenager when he takes flight, first to England then on to Germany where he confronts his pursuers in an inevitable face-off. In attempting to recollect the past from a Cambodian retirement home for mercenaries, the narrator recalls scenes from a final, crippling mission to Africa, and traces a pivotal moment when a boy seeking emotional connection performs an act violence even his handlers could not have imagined. If it appears possible to reconcile the fragments of his life and navigate the errors of the past before, like the man next to him, his mind goes, then My is the catalyst for this hope. His nurse, My is the only other through whom he feels alive. When she disappears without notice he must summon the will to complete his work alone, seek a new attachment or give up entirely-a state of being he seems always to have been prepared for.