Best friends, Kip Calder and Brice McCarthy are born on the same day in 1944 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the most secret place on earth. Sons of men who work on the Manhattan Project, they play macabre games, tempting the fate that looms over their closed community. One night, runaways, they make a crazy pilgrimage to the desert chapel of Chimayo to eat the holy dirt and atone for the legacy that haunts their families and themselves. Their two lives spiral apart after this joyous, terrifying moment: in the sixties, as Brice becomes an antiwar activist, Kip disappears into Vietnam and ultimately into the covert war in Laos, leaving Brice to marry Jessica Rankin, the woman they both love. Then, twenty-five years later, Kip returns, a ghost soldier perhaps come to reclaim what was lost, and so threatens to shatter everything his old friend has built.