Lip Mba’ekuaba is a hyper-aware, one-legged little person with a knack for deception. Caliandra Nunes is a quiet seventeen-year-old girl with an unforgiving smart mouth. Lip’s simple life on a ranch in the middle of the Brazilian Cerrado (savanna ecosystem) in the early 1970s couldn’t be more different from Caliandra’s life in the bustling São Paulo of 2013. Yet, their stories are intertwined through their contact with a mysterious, contorted plant that holds the key to that which is true. When threatened by a skinwalker known as Aname’yma, Lip has to use all of his wit to keep the plant alive. Caliandra struggles to free herself from the plant's influence in a time of social unrest, when a gruesome murder in the heart of São Paulo resembles the attack of a large predator.