20-year-old Colin Dane has spent his life trying to be the perfect son. That’s difficult when your father is a celebrated officer in a theocratic autocracy, and your skin is starting to announce you’re gay. In Colin’s world, sexuality emerges as colored patterns called the Chroma. Blue and Pink are divine order. Lavender gets you genetically “purified,” and gloves can only hide the spreading truth for so long.

When his mother, Annie, helps him escape, Colin and his boyfriend, Bryan, turn to his estranged aunt, who smuggles Lavenders toward the secular Commonwealth as a Shepherd on the underground Chroma Line. Between them and freedom lie the Barrens, a war-blasted wasteland patrolled by drones and Magistrate troops. Safe houses fall, trusted routes collapse, and shelter can become a trap. Back inside the walls, Annie faces imprisonment for choosing her son over doctrine, forcing her to confront the cruelty she once accepted as faith.

Leading the hunt is Colin’s father, Daniel, whose devotion to the Magistrate has earned him power, respect, and the responsibility of delivering his own son for purification. As the pursuit exposes what that obedience actually costs, he must choose between the institution that made him and the family it demands he destroy. And when Bryan is captured, Colin faces his own choice: take his chance at freedom or turn back to save the man he loves and finally face his father.

Gattaca meets Children of Men, with the escape-driven stakes of Night Crossing.