Five friends arrive back in Eternal Springs, Arkansas, the small town they all fled after high school graduation. Each is drawn home by a cryptic, scrawled two-word letter that reads, You promised. It has been 15 years since the summer that changed their lives, and they’re anxious to find out why Brandi called them back, especially when they vowed never to return. But Brandi is missing. She’d been acting erratically for months, railing at whoever might listen about magic all around them. About a power they can’t see. And about strange houses that appear only when you need them.

Josephine Morrow is Girl One, the first of nine Miracle Babies conceived without male DNA on an experimental commune known as the Homestead. The Girls were raised in the shadow of controversy --- plagued by zealots calling them aberrations and their mothers demons --- until a devastating fire at the Homestead claimed the lives of three people, leaving the survivors to scatter across the United States. Years later, upon learning that her mother has gone missing, Josie sets off on a desperate road trip, tracking down the only people who might help: her estranged sisters. Tracing clues her mother left behind, Josie joins forces with two of the Girls, and they journey back through their past, uncovering secrets about their origins and unlocking devastating abilities they never knew they had.

In an unnamed city, Eurydice works for the Elysian Society, a private service that allows grieving clients to reconnect with lost loved ones. She and her fellow workers, known as "bodies," wear the discarded belongings of the dead and swallow pills called lotuses to summon their spirits. But when Edie, a body, channels Sylvia, the dead wife of recent widower Patrick Braddock, she becomes obsessed with the glamorous couple. Despite the murky circumstances surrounding Sylvia’s drowning, Edie breaks her own rules and pursues Patrick. After years of hiding beneath the lotuses’ dulling effect, Edie discovers that the lines between her own desires and those of Sylvia have begun to blur, and takes increasing risks to keep Patrick within her grasp.