Anna the Red, a teenage runaway in Seattle, auditions for an amateur theatrical billed as a Stone Age Opera. The opera tells an ancient tale from a lost society a story of self-sacrificing innocence overcome by suffocating evil. The inspirational brainchild of the opera is Dr. Elizabeth Mellony, a forensic archaeologist, who teams up with Malcolm Washington, a black ex-con, to produce the show. On opening night Anna is spirited away by her father, a bigoted Idaho backwoodsman who tracks her down in the city. She leaves behind a mysterious note-a page torn from an old notebook given to her by a member of a paramilitary environmental group called Whole River Systems. Years earlier, Malcolm had been given 13 private notebooks written by his troubled grandfather. But the notebooks were stolen while Malcolm was in prison. The page Anna leaves behind is from one of the notebooks written by Malcolm's grandfather. That single page provides the first clue to the mysterious disappearance of the notebooks. But when Anna tries to help, she finds herself up against Mortim Rimpoche, the paranoid spiritual leader of Whole River Systems. Her youth and naïveté collide with his unmerciful narcissism, creating a near fatal showdown.