“I was twelve when I realized I was a ghost.”

So says Constance Fairchild, an eccentric poetess who is heiress to a fortune — and a girl who, from an early age, has believed that she had been reincarnated.

Orphaned at the age of 14, when her parents die under suspicious circumstances, she is sent to a boarding school in Switzerland, a country that had haunted her dreams. Here, she makes her first real friends and stumbles on clues to her past life.

When several of her friends die under suspicious circumstances, Constance has reason to believe that her legal guardian may be responsible. What possible motive could her guardian have? Searching desperately for the answer, Constance only uncovers further questions that convince her that she may be part of some grand conspiracy. Who keeps planting listening devices in her dorm room? Why were people following both her and her friends? Why did her dead grandfather require emails from him to contain an electronic signature that was lost when he died?

Spanning two lifetimes, this conspiracy — involving pieces of the puzzle that Constance must strive to unravel through her instinctive knowledge of virtual reality, cryptography, and the Internet — threatens to destroy everyone she knows and loves.

Pursued across Europe and New York, Constance searches for answers and tries to survive. With the help of her friends, she manages to expose the conspirators, turn their tools against them, and by the novel's end, she solves the greatest mystery of all: Her reason for being.