Outskirts of Moscow. A girl comes to an unfamiliar apartment to look after a dog. After a while, she realizes that the owner of the apartment has disappeared. She finds herself into a series of people that have been taking care of the dog for years in that same apartment, creating a weird community around this strange absence of the owner.

Elena is a student in Minsk. She is having an intense but self-destructive love affair with Viktor. When Elena's father goes to prison she has to take charge of his business dealings to help him. She drives repeatedly into the restricted zone at Chernobyl, behind the wheel of a truck, in order to smuggle contaminated steel. The conflicts with Viktor escalate, and Elena is increasingly captivated by the zone's deceptive beauty...

The year is 2032. Ten years after a war with a race of genetically altered humans dubbed ‘rats’, special units of ‘rat catchers’ seek out and exterminate the last remaining hybrids. One of them is Zoe. She manages to evade detection using a false identity, and becomes a rat catcher herself. Any out of character slip on her part could expose Zoe for who she really is, and an encounter with her ‘rat’ father, with whom she lost contact during the war, could cost Zoe her life.