The First Law takes place on a pelagic world of unknown coordinates, and is inhabited by aliens, ghosts, and robots, suffering from many of the same problems that plague humanity. A young member of a warrior underclass realizes just how fragile his place in society is when he's charged for the very crime his own superiors order him to intervene in. He goes on the run, taking his implicated friends—and an enemy—with him in the search for freedom. But little do any of them know that they are to play a part in a much grander design of the sort that only gods and ancestors could choreograph, and that true freedom may not be what they originally thought.