Seven years ago Bernadette Macomber did everything she could to cut her ties to her father Fabian, his opiate addiction, gun collection, and increasingly bizarre behaviour. She moved with her husband and four children, leaving no return address. Now, following his suicide, her father paradoxically makes contact again, and Bernadette finds herself not liberated but tethered to him ever more tightly by the bonds of familial guilt. Desperate for absolution, Bernie returns to her father's home to hunt for evidence of his insanity and to try and understand why suicide became his answer. While she remains driven in her quest to understand the power of the parent/child bond, her father, Fabian, locked into his after-life purgatory, pushes for freedom via any available loophole through the punishing bureaucracy of personal evolution. While exploring his options, he encounters his jailor, the demon/angel Bune in the afterlife space of Corridor Nine. The colliding events trigger a complicated set of mysteries: there is the planet at the centre of Bune's "master plan" diagram and the puzzle of its eventual connection to Bernadette's painting; there is the addiction artifact that Bune pulls out of Fabian's chest, and a host of other symbols and rites such as a blastoshere and embryo division all revealed while Fabien wanders the constant maze of Corridor Nine. On planet Earth Bernadette continues obsessively in her need to solve the mystery of her father's death and his continued contact with one question guiding her: how can she achieve a father and daughter reunion that will bring them both peace and liberty?
