Enka grows up on the poor side of a walled city in Florida, gets a scholarship to an elite art school, and immediately fixes on Mathilde, the prodigy everyone else is afraid to approach. Mathilde is genuinely great and genuinely fragile, and Enka makes herself indispensable. Mathilde goes to the Whitney and the Venice Biennale. Enka goes nowhere, marries into a tech fortune, and gains access to a technology called the Scaffold that lets one person inhabit another’s mind, supposedly to absorb their trauma. She uses it on her friend, to unintended consequences.
Immaculate Conception