A group of friends get lost in the seedy streets where they encounter a crazed gang of homeless derelicts that seizes them and kills them one by one. The surviving man escapes on foot, naked and unarmed, with a pack of depraved transients in pursuit, and only seconds away from capture.
When Emily, a librarian-to-be, is assigned to tutor Mateo, a struggling undergrad, in American Lit, they do not get along; but when the discussion turns from classics to confessions, they learn something that could change their lives forever.
Ulugh Beg was one of the world's greatest astronomical minds, an enlightened leader who turned medieval Samarkand into a great center of science 150 years before Galileo invented the telescope.