The far-flung imperial frontier is no place for greenhorns. Two Toes, the renegade Tigerillian war chief, is off the reservation and slaughtering human settlers west of the Bloody Muddy. Only a half-grown boy with a heart full of vengeance and bottled lightning in both hands stands between the outlaw war chief and the rest of the western frontier. But there are secrets about young Lightning Ryan Taylor that span the known universe. Secrets that have long been kept from young Ryan and that are about to catch up with him, whether he is ready for them or not. Dogged by a native prophecy from the day of his birth and the hardness of his frontier home world, Ryan must stop the renegade, still the wildfire of racial war, and reunite with the mother, whom he thought long dead. Beware the line where science crosses back into magic