Harka signed up for the monitor program to get money for a new business. She wants to open a small shop but will have to hire help. Her people skills are crappy. Her assignment is to go into a man's mind and keep him distracted until he is healed from a life-threatening plague. She never imagined what she was walking into. Derin has been asleep for centuries, content to reread the books and reports he archived in his life before the Edinar plague. When the stranger drops in on him, he believes she is a fantasy female, but when she starts cracking jokes, he knows she is far much more than he dreamed. He doesn't want to wake.