A woman with schizophrenia is raising two children: the eldest is nineteen, the youngest is six. After the mother takes her own life during another exacerbation, the brother and sister are left alone. Social services want to take the boy away. They accuse the older sister of negligence and threaten to throw her into a mental hospital if she does not give up her brother. The only thing left to do is to run. Live first with relatives, and then in foreign cities, doing odd jobs, until fate brings the brother and sister to a dusty hotel on the outskirts of the desert, where an alchemist, having turned the inhabitants into slaves, is trying to return damned souls to earth and open the doors to another world.