Astra has returned to Chicago and the everyday life of a cape: getting kittens out of trees, training, aiding the city's emergency first-responders, training, doing public relations events, training, and the occasional superhero v. supervillain fight that threatens to level neighborhoods or at least set them on fire. Then Astra takes a hard hit during a fight and very briefly finds herself somewhere else, somewhere she's only been before in dreams and in the company of Kitsune, a shape-shifting trickster fox. 

It's been just weeks since the state funeral for the Sentinels, Atlas, Ajax, and Nimbus, lost in the Whittier Base Attack. Astra, Hope, is recovered from her own injuries. At least physically. Mentally... not so much, but she feels ready to actively wear the cape again. Which is good since, between the revelation of her short-lived relationship with Atlas and her virally pungent public comments on the current political debate over breakthrough registration (the National Public Safety Act), she needs to raise her profile. But she's better now, steady, ready for anything. Or is she?

Astra has become one of the most popular Sentinels in Chicago, past scandals notwithstanding, and is now the team leader of the Young Sentinels. But on their first big solo outing, the new junior Sentinels fall into a new scandal - one which could cost them the team. And Astra has a dream visit from Kitsune, the odd shapeshifter-thief who precipitated the battle between the Sentinels and Villains Inc. the year before. The dream warns of a fresh disaster, in a town Astra has never seen before and that may not actually exist.

Things are relatively quiet in the great metropolis of Chicago. Astra, a.k.a. Hope Corrigan, is able to breathe a little, to hang out with her friends, and even to attend classes (where her professors are starting to think she is a myth). But Blackstone is loading more training and responsibilities on her, and converging events threaten the compromises she has made to balance her superhero career and student life. Worse, a new super villain has come to town, and it will take all of Chicago's capes to defeat the threat of the Green Man - if he can be defeated at all. 

Astra has finished her training and is now a full-fledged Sentinel, but things are not going well. She suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, and the public revelation of her relationship with Atlas has caused her popularity to nosedive. To complicate things, the Teatime Anarchist's intervention has changed the course of events - leaving her with lots of knowledge about the way the future was before the Big One, a complete future-history that is now out of date.