In Pakistan, Amal holds onto her dream of being a teacher even after becoming an indentured servant to pay off her family's debt to the wealthy and corrupt Khan family.

Someone in Pakistan is killing the members of a new CIA intelligence unit that is trying to buy peace with America's enemies. It falls to Sophie Marx, a young CIA officer with a big chip on her shoulder, to figure out who's doing the killing and why.

Fifteen-year-old Peak Marcello is invited to participate in an "International Peace Ascent" in the Hindu Kush, with a team made up of under-eighteen-year-old climbers from around the world--but from the first something seems wrong, so when the group is attacked, and most of the climbers are either killed or kidnapped, Peak finds himself caught up in a struggle to survive, shadowed by the Shen, a mysterious snow leopard.

An eighty-year-old woman slips into a deep depression at the death of her husband, then resurfaces to gain a new lease on life. Her determination to fly in the face of convention, including striking up a friendship with a hijra (trans) woman, confuses her bohemian daughter, who is used to thinking of herself as the more "modern" of the two. At the older woman's insistence they travel back to Pakistan, simultaneously confronting the unresolved trauma...